AOL or Apple customer? Click for full size

[caption id="attachment_177" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="AOL or Apple Customer - fill in the right blank. Click image to view full size"][/caption]

Especially with the AOL triangle thing looking like an arrow, to me this looks like one blank for AOL customers and one for Apple customers. It’s even worse when your login fails, because then it draws an arrow between the AOL logo and the blank, which just emphasizes the connection between AOL and the bottom blank. One has to wonder, has Apple tested the usability on this at all? I thought it was just me, but I showed it to Theresa and she had the same reaction as me.

By the way, one blank is for username and the other for password. Of course, this is a pretty standard interface, but as more sites (like my banks and credit cards) now have two or three-step logins, so you enter your username, then you get a verification image, then you enter your password. I assumed it was like that here.

I find no evidence that Safari requires Quicktime to run. In fact, the most relevant page I find at Apple suggests that Quicktime is more likely to render to Safari unstable and is only needed to display streaming media (and I get by just fine without it in Firefox). Maybe I’m just wrong about this and Safari simply cannot and will not run without Quicktime, but frankly, I don’t care.

And why should Apple care? Because Apple is a company that often “gets it”. They understand how to be customer-centric, hip, cool, friendly. Somehow, while Windows ran on a completely open architecture and Apple OSes ran only on proprietary equipment, Apple managed to gleen all the good warm fuzzies while MS was vilified. In other words, Apple excels at reputation management, guerrilla marketing and all that stuff. Think different.

What better way to get a Windows user away from Windows than to offer up for free a killer browser with the implied hint that if you like the browser, you should see it integrated into an entire OS. What worse way to get me to switch than to do like MS always does, treating me like they know better and they’ll set it up for me. Please, think different.

So thank you Apple for making a windows version of Safari available. I appreciate it. Really. I just don’t plan to ever install it as long as it’s a two-fer with Safari and Quicktime. I know you think you’re helping me out, but I don’t need help really. I just want to try a new browser.