Apple: Evil, or Stupid?
Sep. 20th, 2005 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bnewmanIn QuickTime 7, "Save As..." is a PRO feature.
By itself, that's merely evil, and — sad to say — merely the industry standard level of evil.
In Safari, "Save As..." commands issued from Safari's own "File" menu on objects that load in the QuickTime plugin are dispatched through QuickTime, which means they will fail without QuickTime PRO.
Excuse me... which means they will fail silently and mysteriously without QuickTime PRO. No error or alert appears, a file gets saved, it's of the right type — only it isn't. It's just a few KB, and while QuickTime Player will complain if you try to open it, iTunes will just silently do nothing, which is the behavior that had me worried for a while.
This doesn't qualify as a "security" feature to prevent "theft" of media, no matter how ill conceived, because I have a URL for the exact object I'm trying to save, a fact that will be true in most cases where this will come up. If I have a clickable link to it, I can option-click it to download instead of display. If all I have is the URL itself, I can paste it into Safari's downloads window (even though there's nowhere to type in that window, if you foreground it and paste a URL, Safari will start downloading that file), or I can type the URL in the address bar (where it already is, typically), and hit option-enter instead of enter. Or I can use a different browser — or just wget.
What I can't do is surf to the file, have it display in Safari through the QuickTime plugin, and then save it without pulling it down the pipe again. This actually makes sense as a mechanical consequence of removing "Save As..." functionality from QuickTime basic, because Safari doesn't have the file in memory — the QuickTime plugin does, and it won't give it up.
Anyway, making basic functionality of an API that enables common user routines a premium feature? Evil. Doing so in a way that causes those routines to fail silently, without generating either an error message or an advert for the premium feature-set in question, so that even relatively savvy users will suspect serious bugs in two applications before fingering the plugin as the culprit? Stupid!
By itself, that's merely evil, and — sad to say — merely the industry standard level of evil.
In Safari, "Save As..." commands issued from Safari's own "File" menu on objects that load in the QuickTime plugin are dispatched through QuickTime, which means they will fail without QuickTime PRO.
Excuse me... which means they will fail silently and mysteriously without QuickTime PRO. No error or alert appears, a file gets saved, it's of the right type — only it isn't. It's just a few KB, and while QuickTime Player will complain if you try to open it, iTunes will just silently do nothing, which is the behavior that had me worried for a while.
This doesn't qualify as a "security" feature to prevent "theft" of media, no matter how ill conceived, because I have a URL for the exact object I'm trying to save, a fact that will be true in most cases where this will come up. If I have a clickable link to it, I can option-click it to download instead of display. If all I have is the URL itself, I can paste it into Safari's downloads window (even though there's nowhere to type in that window, if you foreground it and paste a URL, Safari will start downloading that file), or I can type the URL in the address bar (where it already is, typically), and hit option-enter instead of enter. Or I can use a different browser — or just wget.
What I can't do is surf to the file, have it display in Safari through the QuickTime plugin, and then save it without pulling it down the pipe again. This actually makes sense as a mechanical consequence of removing "Save As..." functionality from QuickTime basic, because Safari doesn't have the file in memory — the QuickTime plugin does, and it won't give it up.
Anyway, making basic functionality of an API that enables common user routines a premium feature? Evil. Doing so in a way that causes those routines to fail silently, without generating either an error message or an advert for the premium feature-set in question, so that even relatively savvy users will suspect serious bugs in two applications before fingering the plugin as the culprit? Stupid!
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 04:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 05:08 am (UTC)Though what confuses me is that I'm pretty sure Firefox also uses the QuickTime plugin to display movies, and yet it doesn't have this problem. The protections on the QuickTime Pro features seem to poorly implemented in several cases (for example, there are a couple of ways to play a movie in fullscreen mode in the actual QuickTime application, including a Dashboard widget), so it may be a symptom of that. If so, I hope they don't "fix" it anytime soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 05:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-20 02:10 pm (UTC)Thank you, thank you! I've been using wget on sccs for such things (because Pair inexplicably doesn't seem to have wget), which involves sshing and scping and lots of time....
I use Firefox for (Google QR) work but still use Safari for everything else, I guess because I've never taken the time to really learn FF and customize it. I really should, but I like the GUI of Safari much better....