Quicktime: we own your desktop
Apologies for slow blogging. Been working in parallel on a number of important tracks. Some interesting stuff coming up shortly. In the meantime, I will trouble you with this rant on a trivial annoyance.
If you use a Windows computer for any period of time, your system tray — the little box next to your clock on your task bar — will get clogged up with a million and one icons you don’t need or care about. The tray is useful for stuff like “safely remove hardware”, but it’s stupid as a location for applications. That’s what the “quick launch” icons are for; that’s what your “start” menu is for; that’s what any number of other utilities are for. When an application pushes its icon into the system tray it’s almost always redundant — a case of corporate overreach.
So when renegade applications insist on putting their icons in the system tray anyway, in a sort of desktop manifest destiny policy, I get peeved, and I try to figure out how to banish them. Usually, though not always, it’s possible.
I hate to think of something as routine and plumbing-like as Quicktime as a renegade application, but in this way, at least, it is. I went through the “get this thing out of my tray” routine with Quicktime a long time ago; I found the “preferences/advanced” dialogue that let me express my wishes; I did so and thought that was the end of it.
Today, suddenly, it turned up again. I soon realized I’d recently allowed Apple’s auto-update install a new version of Quicktime. OK, I’m willing to turn this sort of routine patching and maintenance over to the software companies — I’d rather they worry about it than have to worry about it myself.
But how rude is it to overwrite a user’s preferences and force the reappearance of an annoying icon that you’ve already ordered the program to suppress? Why does Apple do this stuff? To me this is just one tiny but telling instance of the company’s perpetual dance between delivering useful innovations and behaving as a desktop Big Brother that pretends to know better than you do what you really want.
Me? I just want Apple to keep its fingers out of my system tray.
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September 12th, 2007 at 12:04 am
I’ve easily uninstalled quicktime over 20 times over the years.
They just don’t get it.
WindowsKey-R
msconfig
is your friend.
It’s hiding there under qttask.exe
September 12th, 2007 at 2:51 am
qttask.exe is there to work around the limitations of running in browsers. You know how flash video judders when you switch focus away from browser windews, then catches up in a burst, but QuickTime doesn’t? Thats because of qttask.exe running to keep it playing smoothly.
September 12th, 2007 at 7:22 am
I’ve got no problem with the task running in the background — I think that’s what you’re talking about, Kevin, right? I just don’t want the background task grabbing my screen real estate — and then, once I’ve reclaimed it, grabbing it *again* after an update. If I need to check up on what it’s doing I can always summon the task manager…
September 13th, 2007 at 4:03 am
“Icons loaded into the [system tray] are actually programs or parts of programs taking up valuable memory space in the computer RAM…. So, too many icons in the systray usually means too many programs have been loaded at start-up, and very often means a decrease in the computer’s performance.” (From an article at CNET.)
That’s always been my reason behind removing these icons.
September 24th, 2007 at 3:38 pm
Quicktime is so obnoxious on Windows that I have removed it from my Mac as well, coaxing the poor thing to use mplayer instead.
Just a step above RealPlayer. Ick!!
-danny