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Apple's Quicktime holds Windows users to ransom
It can come as a shock to we Brits sometimes when we meet Americans and realise that, despite having a broadly overlapping culture and speaking more or less the same language, they are easily as different from us as the French or Germans.
One instance of this is differing reactions to the way Apple exploits its products to flog more products. Americans in general seem to have no objection to this - most of the protests about iPod lock-ins have come from Europe.
My instinct when I find iTunes dragging me to the Apple music store is to resist any temptation to buy; the average American's reaction seems to be to congratulate the company on its marketing skills.
After writing a piece on the MacOS for our print magazine, mentioning this irritation, I resolved to steer clear of the subject for fear of allowing it to cloud my technological judgement.
Shortly afterwards I was forced to confront it again, when downloading a picture from (of all places) the Microsoft site. At some point recently I must have clicked a prompt for an Apple Quicktime upgrade on my main Windows PC, and it had plugged itself into Explorer and signed itself up to open a variety of picture formats.
When I clicked a .tif of the departing Bill Gates, Qucktime opened it within Explorer, no problem. But when I right clicked on it to save the image to disk, instead of giving me the standard IE menu allowing this, I got a Quicktime prompt offering me two choices: Save as source, or Save as a Quicktime Movie.
A .tif is not a movie so I clicked Save as Source as the option that came closest to having any meaning. I was then presented with a prompt saying that the only way I could save this 'movie' was to buy Quicktime Pro (£20 from Apple UK).
In other words, Apple was asking me to pay for functionality that its software had switched off in Windows. Disabling Quicktime from within Explorer is not enough to reverse this - it means you can't even display the picture. You have to go into Control Panel and change the file associations, after which Explorer will happily save the file for free.
I was knowledgeable enough to realise what had happened and do this. But many Windows users would be caught out.
You could argue that Apple's relentless commercialisation of the MacOS desktop is no different from the kind of in-house promotions seen in most major publications, online and off, though Bill Gates got hauled up before the DoJ for doing much the same.
Similarly you might see the sealed-in batteries in many Apple products not as built-in obsolescence but as the price you have pay for the aesthetics.
But this trick with QuickTime is beyond excuse so far as I am concerned. Apple makes some great products, but how it keeps its image squeaky clean I do not know.
Similar crap like tha, happened to me even in pre-OS X Macs. You were given choices for file type preferences at installation. I NEVER allow a program to have it's way with all the file types on it's list. If you uncheck them at installation, IE and other programs use default. Do ever let it happen to you again. Of course Clive, this advise is for every one else as I am sure you know it.
Posted by Bill | June 27, 2008 9:57 PM
.TIF is not supported on Windows, Hello. Before you installed QT you could not open a .TIF file anyway.
PS Why the HELL isnt .TIF supported native to Windows anyway? Mac has it native, ALL faxes use .TIF, CAD/CAM uses .TIF.
Posted by steve wolff | June 27, 2008 9:59 PM
It's more of a "legal" problem than anything to do with Apple. The deal is, QuickTime uses many codecs that are "licensed", thus Apple must "legally" charge people that want to save files as sources or "movies" in their formats.
On a Mac, you just drag and drop a image from a web browser, so personally, I would just get rid of the PC so you can do this easily and never have to save in a format just to save a picture.
Or just google around and find the QuickTime Pro key and enter it.
Posted by OS11 | June 27, 2008 11:02 PM
You write a column on technology and computers and don't know how a program got installed on your computer? Not sure if this speaks badly of Windows or of your knowledge.
Posted by kirasaw | June 28, 2008 1:35 AM
Tiffs are meant to support four color (U) separation and are not Mac specific... The tiff format is used mainly for the print industry and users may use a PC or a Mac.
BTW, if you don't want to buy something....don't. Lets not blame Americans for forcing you to "take part" in a service.
Posted by Bobzhuman | June 28, 2008 5:28 AM
Listen, if you really don't want to spend the thirty bucks for QuickTime Pro, generally, all you have to do is right click on the link to a picture or movie and save it. Once it is saved, you can still open it in the editor of your choice. QT Pro allows you to click on the picture itself and open it.
If you are looking for a free TIF editor, check out http://versiontracker.com.
Posted by MisterRon | June 28, 2008 3:21 PM
Bill, yes .tif IS supported on Windows. I don't have QuickTime on my PC and it'll open .tif's fine. Same for my uni's computers as well.
Posted by David | June 28, 2008 8:15 PM
"Blagh, Blagh Sealed batteries Blagh"
When will you hacks stop going on about the closed box on Apple's portable devices. The batteries are fine, they last for years and years (I have evidence in the form of my sister-in-law's 2nd gen iPod that runs for hours still.
Most people do not change the batteries in their phones or PMPs unless the batteries were crap to begin with. My Nokia E61 has had the same battery in it for 2+years and it has been out once because I wanted to see what was underneath.
"Incisive media" - Pah! Incensing Media more like.s
Posted by Apple Watcher | June 29, 2008 7:37 AM
I can't believe you actually resist buying songs you want from iTunes because you feel you've been 'duped' into it. Shame on Apple for making the process so simple and enjoyable that you actually find yourself using it even though you don't want to!
Posted by Bob | July 3, 2008 1:01 PM
Bill -
Hello, yourself. TIF files will absolutely open in Windows without 3rd party tools, including Quicktime. This has been the case for years.
BTW Kirasaw - The issue has absolutely nothing to do with 4-color process and the TIF format. It's a problem with Apple's installer "taking over" the image file handling subroutines, in ways it should not.
Posted by thorn | July 24, 2008 11:16 PM
Vist - Quicktime - Tif
Suddenly now my PC cant open multipage tif's! When I click on one, it give the quicktime logo, and then displays only the first page. I did not say quicktime should be the default viewer, and in fact, in all the places that this can be verified (file associtations, MIME, etc) I have checked, and its not assigned to be default viewer for tif files (on my PC). So then why, oph, why is it still being used by my machine as the default viewer for Tif???
See the following link for more on Apple-crap!
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1963352&tstart=0
Posted by John | April 6, 2009 10:09 AM
The title of my post should read:
Vista - Quicktime - Tif
Posted by John | April 6, 2009 10:14 AM