Panther Impressions
I was lucky enough to attend WWDC 2003 in June, and along with my free iSight I also received a beta of Panther. Since I’ve been using Panther for the last four months, I thought I’d talk about some of the new or improved features that I’ve found useful.
Exposé and Fast User Switching
Exposé is arguably the most important (if not most talked about) new feature in Panther. Exposé gives you instant access to a window (or the desktop) with a single keystroke or mouse gesture. Exposé can tile all of the open windows, it can tile all of the active application’s windows, and it can reveal the desktop.
Exposé has completely changed the way I work. In fact, I find it incredibly frustrating working on an operating system without Exposé! Before, finding the right window involved hiding applications and closing or minimizing windows (a time-consuming process). With Exposé, all I have to do is press a key or hit a hot corner and Exposé tiles the windows on screen for me, making finding the right window easy. Exposé is also incredibly fun to demonstrate to others, especially if they’ve never used a Mac before!
The only time that Exposé falls short of my expectations is when I’m dealing with a lot of windows that all look the same (say, a number of plain text documents); it’s hard to tell which window is which when the thumbnails all look the same. While Exposé does display the title of the window when you mouse over it, it’s still hard to quickly select the window you want.
Fast user switching is incredibly slick. The Keynote-like transition is fun to watch, and works so quickly that there’s hardly any delay when switching from one user to another. Fast user switching is also useful even if there is only one user, since it allows you to lock your Mac by switching to the login dialog. Plus, fast user switching, like Exposé, is also incredibly fun to demonstrate.
Finder
While I’m not thrilled with the brushed metal appearance of Finder, I am thrilled with the new sidebar. The sidebar has two panes; the top pane lists hard drives, network drives, and optical media while the bottom pane lists your favourite folders. Click on any icon in the sidebar and you’re instantly taken to that drive or folder. You can even eject drives from the sidebar. Needless to say, the sidebar makes navigating around the file system incredibly easy.
Mail also has a number of new and improved features. You can now organize conversations by thread, making it easy to follow discussions or find other messages in a thread. Spam filtering in Mail has also improved; it’s much more accurate than the spam filtering in Jaguar. After training Mail, I hardly get any spam in my inbox, nor do I get any real mail in my junk email folder.
Mail now uses Safari (or rather WebCore) to render HTML email. As a result, HTML email now looks a lot better in Mail. You can also instruct Mail to only load images (and other embedded objects) in HTML email on demand. This is great since it saves you from seeing some of the more “interesting” images that are found in spam, as well as preventing spammers from knowing if and when you read their spam.
Developer Tools
XCode, the new development environment, offers a lot of features and improvements over Project Builder. For one, XCode builds projects much faster than Project Builder. XCode can also perform distributed builds, which use idle computers on the network to do some of the work. Depending on the number of idle computers on your network, this can significantly cut the time it takes to build a project.
XCode also adds a feature called Zero Link which makes developing faster. Zero Link allows developers to skip linking (often a time-consuming step in the build process). While application performance suffers when Zero Linking is enabled, I’ve found the reduced build times more than make up for the performance penalty.
Various and Sundry
There are a lot of little, yet important, changes in Panther. Aqua has been refined; the pinstripes are still present, but are more muted than before. The active window sports a brushed metal title bar (making it easier to pick out).
Apple has also improved keyboard application switching. Panther now presents a semi-transparent window in the centre of the screen with all active application icons; applications are sorted from most recently to least recently used, making it even easier to switch back and forth between a couple of key applications.
Performance has improved with Panther; boot times are faster (much faster in some cases) than Jaguar, and feels more responsive than Jaguar. Most notably, G3-based Macs seem to have the largest boost in performance.
Worth it?
A lot of Mac users seem concerned that Panther isn’t the leap forward Jaguar was, and that it’s not worth the upgrade price. After using Panther for the past few months, I can say that while Panther doesn’t offer a huge increase in performance that Jaguar did, Panther does offer a huge increase in productivity. Panther makes getting work done easier and is, by far, the most pleasant operating system I’ve used.
CandyBar 1.6
Panic and The Icon Factory have released CandyBar 1.6; the easiest way to change icons found in the Finder in Mac OS X.
CandyBar 1.6 is the first version of CandyBar fully qualified to work with Panther. Also, CandyBar, when used with Panther, no longer requires a restart for new icons to take effect; users will only have to log out.
G4 iBook
Apple made an unexpected move today and released the G4 iBooks. The new G4 iBook features a slightly redesigned case, an 800MHz to 1GHz PowerPC G4 processor, slot-loading optical drives, optional Airport Extreme wireless networking, and optional Bluetooth connectivity. Despite the fact that the iBook and the PowerBook now sport G4 processors, the PowerBook still has a [...]
Geek Patrol Launch
Welcome to the official launch of Geek Patrol! While there’s not much here at the moment, over the coming weeks we will feature a number of editorials about the Mac as well as reviews of products for the Mac. For now, though, welcome to Geek Patrol!
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