Speaking of Apple sightings on TV, there's another one we should mention, because it's both timely and slightly unusual. Most sightings involve an actual Mac or Apple display being used by the characters on some show; Apple-branded equipment has done guest stints on a whole slew of shows ranging from Felicity to The X-Files to Home Improvement to The Drew Carey Show to... well, you get the idea. Then there's the other kind of sighting, in which elements of the Mac OS show up when shows or commercials need to show a computer screen and need to have something on it. Those are slightly less common, but they're still pretty prevalent; it's easy to spot Mac cursors, titlebars, menubars, progress bars, and the like in TV commercials, magazine ads, etc.

So the sighting we're talking about now is the second type; last night on Fox, there was heavy rotation of a commercial for Launch.com, touting a "visit our site by midnight, and you could win a home entertainment center" contest. The whole commercial showed the Mac interface, but not as actual screen captures; it looked like they had recreated the Mac experience using 3D animation software for a more "textured" look. Even more interesting, though, was the interface shown as they were demonstrating Launch.com's downloadable music videos; the distinctive brushed metal stylings of the QuickTime 4 player were plainly visible for all to see. There was the big round "Play" button, the smaller "Pause" button to its right, the wheel volume control on the left, etc. It was unmistakable.

Considering that the QuickTime 4 Preview has only been out for a few weeks, we think this represents some mighty fast work on the part of the folks who slapped together Launch.com's latest ad. Unfortunately, as we explored Launch.com in search of videos to view (yes, you can be sure we entered that contest-- winning that entertainment center would put us squarely at the height of couch-potato fashion), we were instructed to download Windows Media Player-- and later, when we tried to explore further, we weren't even able to connect to the video site, getting a "the Web server cannot find the file or script you asked for" error. So while the Launch.com commercial may have the honor of yielding the first big QuickTime 4 sighting, the reality of the site itself may not be as cool...