Mac OS X 'Panther': User at the Center

MatthewRothenberg writes "Over at eWEEK, we believe we've got the drop on the much-discussed interface enhancements to Mac OS X 10.3, a k a Panther: The theme of this September release will be 'User at the Center,' an umbrella term for a variety of new features aimed at leapfrogging Microsoft when it comes to pervasive, user-focused computing. Niceties include user-configurable 'piles,' a fast-user-switching-type feature, and easy transferral of home directories among devices and the Web. Oh, and it's mo' definitely 64-bit-complete, too."

Comments

Re:Will Font Smoothing be less horrid?

[cmoney]

It's the Bronze G3 that's giving you a problem with font smoothing. I know because I have that same computer. I also have a PBG4 and it's so much better, it's unbelievable. Font smoothing on the Bronze G3 is so horrid it makes OS X unusable for me.

Re:Piles?

[michaelggreer]

With piles, you don't have to go "inside" the folder, just pick out the doc you want frm the pile. Take a look here:

http://homepage.mac.com/rdas7/piles.html

New Journaling System

[Anonymous Coward]

The journaling technology extends OS X's HFS+ file system and can be applied to current Mac OS volumes without reformatting. Users of Mac OS X Server can activate journaling by clicking on a "Make journaled" button within the Disk Utility application; they can also access it via the command line or remotely via a Secure Shell (SSH) connection.

Re:New Journaling System

[porkchop_d_clown]

It's also already available on regular OS X, you just have to use the command line.

Re:New Journaling System

[tbmaddux]

It's also already available on regular OS X, you just have to use the command line.

Tease. Here it is. "sudo" will prompt you for your password (you must be an Administrator user for it to accept your password to do this):

sudo diskutil enableJournal /

Replace "/" with other volumes (/Volumes/foo/ and /Volumes/bar/ for example) if you have them on your system.

Re:Piles system

[Daniel_Staal]

Of course if you want to use this OS you will have to shell out $100 to upgrade .1 of a version number. Sheesh!

I actually think Apple's switched to a new version numbering sceme: 10.x.x. The 10 is constant (a marketing number basically), and the x.x is the 'real' version number.

So basically the current version is 2.5, and Panther is version 3.0.

Re:Piles

[Squidgee]

For those of you who are unclear on piles, read this:

"Apple holds a patent on this one. Developed by Gitta Salomon and her team close to a decade ago, a pile is a loose grouping of documents. Its visual representation is an overlay of all the documents within the pile, one on top of the other, rotated to varying degrees. In other words, a pile on the desktop looked just like a pile on your real desktop.

To view the documents within the pile, you clicked on the top of the pile and drew the mouse up the screen. As you did so, one document after another would appear as a thumbnail next to the pile. When you found the one you were looking for, you would release the mouse and the current document would open.

Piles, unlike today's folders, gave you a lot of hints as to their contents. You could judge the number of documents in the pile by its height. You could judge its composition very rapidly by pulling through it."

Re:Piles

[Squidgee]

And, for those of you who want a visual interpretation of how this could work, I got this off of google. It's an interactive flash animation which shows one possible design of how it could work; and, if it works close to this, it's gonna be really cool.

My understanding is that piles don't...

[porkchop_d_clown]

replace folders - they are strictly an organizational metaphor, nothing to do with how files are actaully stashed away.

mirror

[MisterSquid]

Oh, dear. Looks like I'll have to mirror the original.

heh.

Re:hm?

[anthonyclark]

Actually, the reason /. is reporting Apple news a lot is that all the /. crew bought powerbooks and have become born-again Mac users ;-)

Orthogonal, baby!

[Gorimek]

But they're independent of folders. All files will still belong to a folder, but they can also be in one (or more?) piles, organized after whatever scheme makes sense to the user.

Also, you can browse through your pile effectively, and you can tell by looking at the pile roughly how much stuff is in it, and possibly (it's been talked about) how old it is or how long since it's been touched by how much dust and spider web it's collected.

A lot of people are excited by this and have talked about it for a long time, so I hope it will be good. Only actual use will tell though.

Re:What should be improved to beat others

[Fred IV]

The bizarre removal of the capacity for me to have a heirarchal list of more rarely used applications (the Applications Apple menu in prior versions/a Windows Start menu/A KDE/Gnome start panel menu) is not user-centered.

Drag your "Applications" folder into the dock.

Click-and-hold for a second

Blammo, instant "Start Menu"...and you can do it for any folder you want.

Re:Will Font Smoothing be less horrid?

[Capt. DrunkenBum]

How to make OSX more useable on low end hardware.

1. Add RAM.
2. Newer, faster HDD.
3. Add RAM.
4. The dock settings:
Shrink the dock down as small as you can, and still use it.
Magnification off
Possition whatever you like.
Minimize using Scale Effect.
Uncheck Animate opening applications.
Uncheck Automaticly hide and show the dock.

5. Did I mention add RAM.

This is what I did to my 266Mhz Wallstreet, 192Meg RAM, 20 Gig HDD, and it is quite useable. A little slow opening apps, but quite useable otherwise.

With all the Dock eye candy turned on, it was unusable.

OS X Icons

[pneuma_66]

OS X icons are not vector images, they are a collection of 128x128, 64x64, and 32x32 bitmaps. The smooth scaling is just regular old bitmap scaling.

Re:Leapfrogging?

[TrackDaddy]

Let's deal with "roaming home directories" for a moment. As another reader pointed out, this feature has been around since NT4 (maybe even sooner). But you left out a few of the niggling details that make it a "less than ideal solution".

To have a roaming profile, what MS calls roaming home directory, you must authenticate into a domain and have a domain controller available. This is fine in a corporate environment, but most Windows users (other than my esteemed colleagues here on Slashdot) wouldn't know what those terms mean, let alone how to implement them. Then there is the matter of how roaming profiles are actually implemented. When you log onto a system, your home directory, preferences, registry settings, and everything else that makes up your profile is copied from a Windows share to your local host. And when you log off, it is copied back to that share. Notice, I didn't say changes were copied. That's right Sparky, the WHOLE thing gets copied back to the server. And the next time you log on, it does it all over again. Now considering how things like Outlook OST files tend to get large, or as we in the industry like to say, "F*$&@%G HUGE", that means that you get to slog this data back and forth across your network each time a user logs on/off their system. Now, do that for a 5000 user company. Have fun.

So, apple has the opportunity here to do it MUCH better. After all, when you only have to aim as high as "I think I'll just copy everything on my computer every time I log on/off", its pretty easy. So yeah, maybe they will "leapfrog".

- Peace