Well you'd think that very little could go wrong with your iMac when you were away on your holidays for two weeks and didn't even turn the thing on... Wrong!

I'd downloaded the beta version of QuickTime 4 - I just don't get enough of BBC World at work, you see - and when I got back from my hols... it had expired!

So I couldn't play WAV files, couldn't preview images before loading in lots of applications, and Sherlock refused to do any web searches. Thanks, Apple.

You might say it serves me right for downloading a beta version - but this beta version was plugged on the front page of the entire Apple web site... and so I was forced to download the thing again. Clicking on the 'Updater' installed a few files and QT still didn't work.

I tried downloading QT4 at work - I was a little suspicious that it only took 3 seconds to download to Zip disk, and sure enough when I ran it on my iMac it turned out to be a simple program that pulls the relevant files off the internet and installs them on the machine it's running on them. Such is the new Apple way of things - I couldn't save time and money by downloading the whole QT4 files onto Zip at work, and once you'd downloaded them there's no easy way to install them on another machine.

At least Apple listen, however. Word is, QT4 will be available on magazine cover CDs soon, and there is now a standalone installer you can download at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/support/ so you can now download the whole thing in one go and install on many machines.

But do thumbnail previews now work in Photoshop? The first time I tried to preview an image in a File Open dialog box, Quick Time told me I did not have the required component, and would I like to download it from the internet. It was late, I was about to go to bed, so I thought I'd do it another day... only ever since I just get an error message and I'm not not given the option to download the required file. It seems I am actually supposed to install QT4 all over again, according to Apple TIL 58381. Comedians!

All of which would be fine if, of course, QT4 was any good. But its user interface is so bad, so alarmingly unintuitive and bad and contrary to all the basic tenets of the Apple philosophy, that I'm truly worried about the sanity of the powers that be at Apple.

For an excellent discussion of exactly what's wrong with the QT4 user interface, I strongly recommend a visit to The Interface Hall of Shame - and, yes, the Mac version of QT4 is just as bad as the Windows one. And for a sideways glance at the sucking nature of QT4 take a peek at MacCommunist.

Now, let's see what Lyse Doucet is up to...