Screenshots of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Leaked

gorman writes "Screenshots of Apple's next major update to OS X, Panther (10.3), have finally been leaked to the web. For months very little has been known about Panther, with only several minor rumors here and there. These screenshots show off many new features, including the return of labels, a brand new Safari-like finder, and an interesting window management system called Exposé. In addition, the screenshots show off refined visuals and improvements to all of the included Apple applications, such as video support in iChat and enhanced spam filtering in Mail. While these screenshots show off a pre-release version of Panther, it's definitely interesting to see what Apple is working on! Steve Jobs will demonstrate Panther during his keynote this Monday at WWDC and will make it available to developers."

Comments

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirror

http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~12fg/Panther/

Torrent here

[mcgroarty]

Torrent of the index.html and all images is here (panther.torrent) if page gets slashdotted.

Re:Looks the same to me.

[TomHandy]

First off, I assume you don't think this is EVERYTHING that is likely new in 10.3.

Secondly, some of these things do look to be significantly new..... as far as look and feel, of course it's the same.... what would be the point in dramatically changing the look and feel?

Feature-wise though, Expose looks like a very nice addition, as are labels.... not sure what Folder Actions are, but they could also be an interesting addition..... the new drive view also looks like it could be an improvement.

Some of the screenshots of course don't seem different at all, so I'm not sure why they posted them (the main desktop screenshot in particular, although a lot of it is "censored").... but the Mail.app inbox screenshot and the System Preferences screenshot look fairly standard.

Anyway, the point is, this hardly seems to be everything that 10.3 will have, feature-wise... just a few screenshots to show some new things.....

Wait til Monday, of course, for the full thing to be unveiled.

If the only thing that will impress you is a completely brand new look and feel though, then yeah, you'd probably be disappointed. Apple's focus is on adding and improving features, not drastically changing the look and feel itself.

-Tom

Re:Some of these look faked.

[entrox]

The image is supposed to be showcasing a new feature called "expose" (it these are real that is), which should help managing your windows. Take a look at the preferences.

Also you'll notice, that foreground windows are shaded grey and have coloured stoplight buttons, while the unfocused window is plain white and has monochrome stoplight buttons. So, apparently unfocused titlebars are not translucent anymore.

I really hope those screenshots are either fake or just plain unpolished/unfinished. Jaguar looks way better IMHO.

Re:Looks the same to me.

[whee]

Some of the screenshots of course don't seem different at all, so I'm not sure why they posted them (the main desktop screenshot in particular, although a lot of it is "censored")...

They posted that because it demonstrates the Exposé window management. Here's how I'm assuming it works:

1. You move your mouse to a corner of the screen, which handles some type of window.
2. After some delay, all windows not of that type are hidden. Windows of that type are zoomed out (shrunk) until all fit on the desktop.
3. Click on a window to zoom back onto it.

It's really an elegant solution to window clutter. It's either this or virtual desktops, and Apple probably would dislike virtual desktops due to the "where the hell did my windows go" factor. With Quartz, all the zooming should give the user usable visual feedback as to what's going on.

Re:Gnome Themes

[SlamMan]

Gah! They liscensed it originally, which implies consent, as well as money.

Re:Food for thought

[MochaMan]

Course, since they're different in different columns, either Apple screwed up the resources (see Mail.app for a good example of this) or someone faked the screenshots.

Re:Gnome Themes

[overunderunderdone]

Jeff Raskin the original lead developer on the Macintosh (and the man responsible for it's name - it was his favorite eating apple) has largely debunked this as a myth. While I don't think he claims that Parc's work had NO influence on the Mac he has pointed out that many of the supposedly stolen concepts (such as the GUI itself) were present in his computer science thesis published in 1967 before Parc's existed. He also notes that some of the supposedly stolen concepts were already part of either the Mac or Lisa projects which were already under way BEFORE the infamous visit and that he (Raskin) had used others prior to his involvement with Apple itself. Further some concepts (such as drag-and-drop) were never used at Parc and others were used at Parc but not on the SmallTalk system which had been shown to Steve Jobs. He sums up his take on the myth this way:

he Mac was by no means the work of one person, but the combined efforts of thousands in hundreds of companies large and small. It was not, as many accounts anachronistically relate, stolen from PARC by Steve Jobs after he saw the Alto running SmallTalk on a visit. For one thing the usual account (as in Levy's book, "Insanely Great" and others) denigrates the original and creative work done by all the Apple employees that put their hearts into the Mac. Most of the histories of the Mac were written without their authors interviewing the original team (Brian Howard, who contributed so much, is always missed), and the history of the Mac that Apple's own P/R department dispensed was based on Jobs's version. Many didn't speak with me: without knowing that I had worked out many of the key usability ideas when Jobs was still in grade school and before there was a Xerox PARC to learn from, it is perhaps understandable that people would find it necessary to invent a history that derives the Mac's genesis from the nearest similar work. The honest intellectual debt the Mac owes to the work at PARC was not a case of highway robbery.

Quoting from memorty (I can't find his orginal essay on the history of the mac) he attributes the persistance of the myth to the fact that both Steve Jobs and the former Parc guys retell it that way. Steve, because it reinforces his reputations as a visionary genius (HE understood the significance of the GUI when the suits at Xerox were blind, He saw "it was good" and he bid it be fruitful and multiply). The guys at Parc saw it that way because Steve really did "get it". What the Parc guys didn't realise is that Steve "got it" not because he was a visionary genius but because Jef Raskin (and others at Apple) had been patiently explaining the same concepts to him for years (going back to Jef Raskin visiting the Steve's back in their famous garage).