[DonHopkins]

It ebbs and flows over the years. The lowest stinkiest neap tide of the worst ebb ever was the QuickTime 4.0 Player Debacle. "Think Different" but "Do Same".

http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtimeno.htm

Interface Hall of Shame

- QuickTime 4.0 Player -

Amid much fanfare, Apple recently released a beta version of the QuickTime 4.0 Player. Intended to showcase the technological improvements of the QuickTime 4.0 multimedia technology, the QuickTime 4.0 Player sports a completely redesigned user interface. The new interface represents an almost violent departure from the long established standards that have been the hallmark of Apple software. Ease of Use has always been paramount to Apple, but after exploring the QuickTime 4.0 Player, the rationale behind Apple's recent "Think Different" advertising campaign is now clear.

While there are some who would conclude that the revised interface represents innovative thinking at Apple, we would have to conclude otherwise. There is nothing innovative about the user interface of the QuickTime 4.0 Player; the developers adopted the same misguided principles employed in IBM's RealThings, copied some of the same features we critiqued in our reviews of IBM's RealPhone and RealCD, and added a few new follies of their own.

[chongli]

It was much worse than that, long before that. Copland, Taligent, and the warehouses full of aging beige boxes. A million different product lines with inscrutable model numbers. Consumers had no clue which Mac to buy.

Then Apple bought Next and Steve Jobs came back and discontinued all of those product lines and all of the dead-end operating system development and set about turning NextStep into Mac OS X. He released the iMac and Apple finally had a recognizable consumer computer for the first time since the 80s.

[tonyedgecombe]

>Consumers had no clue which Mac to buy.

Interestingly I think they may be falling back into that now, the laptop line in particular looks confused to me.

[rchaud]

Same goes for the iPad and iPhone. Never thought I'd see the day when iPhone model names became as meaninglessly inscrutable as Nokia's or Blackberries (e.g. BB Curve 9730).

[Spooky23]

iOS devices are easy.

There’s the ones that you can buy, and the ones that they want to sell.

[Theodores]

Thanks for the link. I have fond nostalgic reminiscences of these gone wrong interface experiments when skeumorphic design was king. There was an aspect of being patronising about the thinking that went with this, an implicit assumption that users were stupid. Nowadays these design patterns have great retro feel.

To a certain extent everything goes in phases and fashions. The Windows XP style buttons were all the rage for a while, nowadays everything is flat. They won't be flat forever.

As we move further away from the analog world the interface mistakes of the past that hark back to skeumorphic analogues of analog devices have a special quality, maybe not for everyone or every thing, but, if you wanted to design a game and set it back in the last century then things like the QT Player or Microsoft Bob provide great inspiration.