Quicktime, Apple’s prevalent media technology, is seeing its latest incarnation within a den of Snow Leopards, announced this last Monday at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference 2009. As with almost every updated release of the Quicktime, a new icon emerges — in this case it is also accompanied by the addition of an X at the end of the name, probably acknowledging that it will be some time before the blue Q is completely superseded by the new one. In a way, this iteration of the Q-clock is the one that was always meant to be. Finally the count will reach 20 seconds and the arm will tick its way into formal harmony with the Q descender. I’m sure many of us have always wondered why this hadn’t happened at the outset. One can imagine that this current design may have been a predecessor to the first Q release, a version that perhaps wasn’t approved for abstracting “Time” too much, an approval committee saying “What if the second hand was separated from the tail of the Q?” and a designer saying “D’oh!” But let us not dwell on our past experiences, this logomark is finally living up to its potential. While the plastic, gradient-happy rendering complicates an elegant solution, for all of us inclined to do so, we can sit back and imagine the two-dimensional, one-color version and breathe a sigh of relief.

The evolution of the Quicktime logo.