Although the iBook demo went flawlessly, Apple’s software demos did not. Vice President Phil Schiller started off his QuickTime demo by gushing over how well-received the new QuickTime Player was. Apparently, he did not read the criticisms of its horrendous interface in this column or the iArchitect Web site. Or maybe he lives in a reality distortion field. In any case, there’s no denying that Schiller was having trouble with the QuickTime Player’s interface. He always wanted to maximize the window size for playing a movie. Then, he needed to open the favorites drawer to select the next movie, however this required resizing and moving the window so that there would be room to open the drawer. What a great example of user interface chunkiness. When Mac OS 9 arrives in October, we’ll find the QuickTime interface plastered onto Sherlock II, which despite his saying so, apparently does not support natural language queries to Web sites. Other than that, however, it looks pretty darned cool.

Another interface gaffe happened when Jobs was doing a demo with Internet Explorer. He closed the browser window and then could not figure out how to make a new one. Like most beginning Mac users, he seemed to think that he had quit Internet Explorer, so he went to the Finder and reopened it. Since IE 4.5 does not support the reopen AppleEvent, this just switched back to IE without opening a new window. Some members of the audience shouted helpful suggestions, but Jobs apparently wasn’t listening. Sure, many people get confused by this behavior, but I never expected the iCEO to be one of them.