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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."
I find it rather sad just how true that statement is. I have this sneaking suspicion that the OS X of today is the future of many operating systems, not just Windows. Oh well, I suppose that's a good thing, since at least it will hopefully drive development forward.
Improving the the capabilities of the spam filtering in Apple's Mail.app program is nice, but I wonder if they've fixed any of the *REAL* problems? There are so many problems that Macintouch has PAGES of reader reports of issues.
Like, the fact that the application kills its own preferences if your drive runs out of space.
Or the problem of attachments being destroyed when sent if they have a resource fork.
I switched to Mail.app for a day, but switched back to Entourage when I discovered these serious issues, as well as the lack of interface behavior controls (like the fact that Mail.app automatically marks an email viewed in the preview pane as "read", when I don't want it to).
Jory
I agree. I've had the same complaint ever since QuickTime 4 came out:
* With these brushed-metal windows, you cannot tell which window is in front.
I've closed so many windows I didn't intend to simply because I thought it was in the foreground when I hit Cmd-W.
Why did Apple have to toss out all the UI lessons they'd learned since 1984?
Jory
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
i think it is certainly slashdot material, despite the absence of hyping the X11 that will be in it. the upgrade fee is significant, but nothing like m$ considering the absence of serial numbers and other mitigating factors that make it a really easily attainable option to anyone.
/. would do the g5 shots or the the panther shots and was surprised they took this long. 4osx had them long before. i reckon /. did its homework on this one and cowboy neal wasn't just having a bored day.
there are some big differences graphically and at the core, if nothing else in that this release will bring native applications that are based on existing x11 applications. slashdot is pretty late and pretty conservative on this i think, but that is because they actually have a good legal department and are not as easily shut down as the rest of the rumors sites, who are flailing in the light of yesterday and todays posts.
it could just be my nerdiness, but i see huge differences from those screens if nothing else in the process viewer, which does not look like a bad version of top anymore. also, the skin is completely new and worth note considering apple being a graphical os to most. it is not a significant core upgrade, but a user experience upgrade. a promising one at that that may be a 64-bit native version before 10.4. looks big to me, i was wondering when
Frankly, because making money on OSS is HARD.
(Ask Mandrake oops can't)
-E2
The evil monkey commands you to dance.
And like all good dealers, he makes you pay top dollars for it.
Eh.
>Its a damned OS, its a TOOL.. its not some drug induced altered state of mind...
You're partially right - it's an OS, but it's also a user interface, and all of the changes shown in the screenshots are UI changes. It may be jargon that reeks of marketspeak, but "experience" is actually a fairly useful way of thinking about how people work with UIs. It's more than file management and app launching, it's the utility of system alerts and messages, the clarity of the typeface, the ease with which the user understands what's going on, the myriad ways the user's time using the interface is helped or hindered by the UI design.
Apple is giving all developers who attend the WWDC conference a free preview copy of Panther.
I suspect, incidentally, that you're right. There's a load of comments about it being free because it's an "odd numbered release". Bollocks. 10.1 was free because 10.0 was barely usable, not because it was an odd number. Jaguar is a good, mature, stable OS, Apple doesn't have to compensate people for using it...
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
OS X has excellent reliability and stability. Thankfully that's one thing BSD and NeXT helped them achieve from the get go. While I agree that eye candy is fluffy and useless, there is a HUGE issue in between those, and that is USABILITY.
OS X was criticized early on by MacOS fanatics who thought they changed too much. In retrospect some of the changes were good, and some were bad. Regardless, OS X still has a long way to go to reach it's usability potential. There's lots of room for aquafying CLI tools and subtle things like putting the date in the menubar clock. The screenshots show a lot of new meat to the OS, not just cosmetic changes. I don't know whether I agree with charging $100 for the upgrade, but I'll still pay and love it.
That's not a Mail.app bug, that's an OS X behavior. I've experienced this particular little "feature" with MT-Newswatcher, Safari/Chimera/MSIE, AlphaX, Preview, etc.
That said, I've been using Mail.app to handle email from 5 different accounts since 10.0 and I've had no problems with it.
I live in Japan - my family lives in the states. Reason enough for me.
I have 8 Mbit DSL - I can do full voice and video on a PC.
People always told me that Macs were better at Audio/Video.
(Has that changed?)
This was typed on a Mac.
-- My Weblog.
While some may consider it flattering that you want to make Linux look like Mac OS X, Aqua is the property of Apple Computer; it's a trademark, and nobody else has the right to make a user interface just like it.
After seeing posts like these and the cease & desist story on FreeCraft, I have to wonder how much "innovation" open source software actually accomplishes. It seems the entire OSS movement is more interested in stealing other people's ideas than concocting their own.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
Ah, actually there are considerable differences between 10.2 and this release. And dont forget that what you see is a pre-release and not the real deal! So, you really should get your facts straight before posting such gibberish!! I dont even think you even use OSX to post that you cant tell the difference between 10.2 and 10.3!! Firstly, there is the addition to the ichat for video conferencing. Then you have this new 'expose' feature that allows you to temporarily see all windows open at once so you can click on any window to bring it to the front. Then there's this colour label feature that exists in mac classic but osx doesnt have it. The finder window looks different as well...hmmm..get my point? And I dont even believe these are all the new features.
Donate free food here
They don't because they don't believe it will make them money. Seriously.
... this really isn't an attack on you or the GNOME/KDE teams. Some of this is going to seem harsh, but I'm stating my opinion. Please don't take it personally, or as a slam to KDE or GNOME, since I do actually like both of these projects, even though I don't think they (or Apple, for that matter) are the best thing since sliced neko bread.
... what do you mean, exactly, by "little incompatibilities"? Are you throwing this out to make your post look balanced, or did you have something specific in mind? I couldn't think of anything off hand ... until I realized that switching to GNOME or KDE would likely mean GTK+ or QT, which would involve changing the entire desktop API for every Mac OS application. This is not! a "little" incompatibility. Making some sort of Cocoa wrapper would be a huge pain in the ass, no matter how good a coder you are. That would still be better than forcing every OS X developer to rewrite their application (again, if it used to be an old OS 9- program). This would be a huge waste of Apple's time and money and probably piss off their developers to no end.
Using GNOME or KDE in their next release would be a horrible idea for Apple. And here's why.
Apple already just recently (well, 10.0) totally changed their UI and user experience from what it had been for a decade. That pissed off a lot of hardcore old users. Apple doesn't need to go alienating their users again. (And no, I don't feel that the Aqua themes "count". They're pretty, but they're not "there", from my recollection.)
Performance-wise? The most recent releases of GNOME and KDE felt slower on my 866 MHz i686 machine than 10.2 did on my 700 MHz PPC750. Apple really doesn't need their OS getting slower, especially on their low-end machines, which people here already bitch and taunt as being horribly underpowered.
Finally
Really finally, now, as a matter of personal opinion, I do actually like the whole OS X UI system better than GNOME or KDE. The legions of rabid and not-so-rabid Apple loyalists would probably agree with me, since OS X probably at least tries to follow whatever Apple's UI standards are. Not only are GNOME and KDE "not Apple", but the UI experience is different. So I don't think Apple would garner support from their users by switching.
Why is this? Is the system software really changing that dramatically? What makes the older versions of X so hard to support?
A quick answer: in the "Macintosh universe" (for lack of better word) it is much more common to purchase your OS as OEM than it is in the "Windows-Intel unverse". 100% of Macs are being sold with an OEM MacOS (even those that are sold with Linux pre-installed). I don't know the exact figures for x86 machines, but they are obviously nowhere near the 100% figure. If you are a Windows developer, the Windows 95/98 users are still an important client group for you. But if you are a MacOS developer, you don't pay much attention to the MacOS 8.1 users, since they are probably also stuck with pre-1998 machines, and if they didn't cough out money for a new machine in 5-6 years, they will probably neither cough out it for your application. On the other hand, every new Mac that was recently sold was also sold with a recent MacOS. So you don't have to worry, like your Windows counterpart, "is the market ready for a XP-only application". You KNOW that the market is ready for Jaguar-only apps - so why waste your time and energy for MacOS 9.x?
It is true that, by the end of OS9, Apple had refined the user interface very well. It "drove" like a sports car, giving excellent feedback about what was happening. To an experienced user, it was fast, efficient, and transparent.
A lot of that was lost in the transition to Aqua. Some of it is slowly being reincorporated. Aqua also has some new ideas (like "sheets") that are better than OS9 (modal dialogues).
I have heard that "brushed metal" is Jobs' obsession. To me, it is a step backward in usability, and I don't even think it looks good, either.
Reading Slashdot is ruining my spelling and grammar.
If you're trying to stick up for Apple, don't let anyone from Xerox PARC hear you saying that... :-)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
In response to your slightly trollest comment.
Apple have to maintain their "old proprietary stuff" in order to protect their brand. Being a hardware company they have to provide some reason to buy a mac over a dell and user experience is the primary one. Its called a USP or unique selling point. So you are looking at a political/design problem and not engineering/coding problem. Plus Xwindows doesn't hold a candle to quartz. IMHO Apple are walking a fine line between OSS on the one side and propriety code on the other, While not aggressively trying to embrace and extend ala Microsoft, cut them some slack will you.
What I hope will happen is that the OSS UIs that are around start to incorporate some of the ideas from Aqua rather then just trying to clone windows - A practice I personally find to be pathetic considering that windows is just a knock off of Apples ideas in the first place and a pretty lame one at that.
First of all, Apple lost the "look and feel" lawsuit a long time ago.
Secondly, Apple's "new" OS attempts were complete failures until they decided to base their new OS on open source software.
I like Apple, as apparently you do too, but if I were you I would pull my head out of my ass and do some thinking before spouting off nonsense.
the fact that 10.1 was "free". of course by free, I mean that you could go to an apple store and get an upgrade or pay 20 bucks to get the CD shipped to you, but that's a moot point compared to the 79 or 129 prices of 10.2. In all honesty 10.3 will probably be pay, as its another upgrade like 10.2 was i.e. lots of under the hood, and a few new/upgraded apps. I still say bring it on though.
11 was a racehorse
12 was 12
1111 Race
12112
Oh man. and silly me, I went out and bought a two button mouse, this feature sounds like its much much more convenient...
I should stop encouraging trolls, shouldn't I?
Opinionated Law Student Strikes Again!
Panther will be alot better for smp Xserve boxes, and Java Servlets. (Java uses threading heavily as opposed to seperate processes). Yahoo even turned down Java for PHP because FreeBSD 4.x did not have good threading. Remember that previous versions of MacOSX used FreeBSD 4.2 and 4.4 for alot of the internals. SMP support in FreeBSD 4.x = Linux 2.0.
Macs have great UI's and if you use a computer as a workstation, a good as well as flexible gui is nice to have. Also apple uses better resolution icon's and heavy colors so its visual apealing to your eye's. Even the fonts are professionally done with heavy R&D so they are not too blury and easy to read. Try MacOSX for a week and kde, gnome and even Windows will be painfull.
Remember that Apple makes workstations, desktops, and laptops are for consumers so UI is extremely important unlike tradional unixies. They are not made for computer experts. Graphical artists are Apple's main customers who are obsessed with detail. The gui is as important if not more then stability for this market. Internals are not that important.
I have never used MacOSX but I was told that its not as stable as big iron unix's like Solaris or even Linux. It came out a little too early and was quite slow.
Both reliablity and speed improved as the OS matured. But its a hell of alot more stable then MacOS9 or Windows95x. The api's are more solid as well which make bugs less apearent for third party apps that use them.
http://saveie6.com/
That's a hell of a decision to make from a very few images and comments of dubious origins.
Apple has almost always been very conservative with their version numbering schemes. They're not ones to jump to the next whole integer just for the glitz of it.
When 11.0 is released it will either be one of two things:
1. A complete re-write and restructuring of the underlying OS and APIs in a new language or for a new processor/system technology. The re-write will be totally invisible to the end user who will have the nearly the same exact user experience as the previous 10.x version (ala Sys 6 to Sys 7).
2. The entire OS will be redone, a completely new UI willbe developed and the entire Mac OS as you knew it will be tossed out the window. (ala MacOS 9 to MacOS X). Since this has only happened once in the almost 20 years of Macintosh existence, I would doubt VERY highly that this would occur on your desired upgrade timeline.
Article X: The powers not delegated... by the Constitution...are reserved...to the people
more and more /. posts, comments, and 'reviews' of
updates to OSs focus soley on the eye candy, and
ignore issues of whats changed under the hood to
actually make the OS better. It would be sad
indeed if we have reached the point in OS development where all that matters is if the
title bar is brushed metal or something else.
That's somewhat of a trick question, because the answer is "I wouldn't." Nobody would.
However, there is a fundamental difference between an older PC and an older Mac. I built my current 1.5GHz PC roughly 2 years ago. I've since upgraded the RAM to 768MB of PC2100 DDR, added a somewhat newer video card (Voodoo3 to TNT2 Ultra), and picked up a couple new drives to replace my *really* old floppy drive and CD-R. It's my day-to-day workhorse and handles everything from multi-track audio editing to gaming and graphic design.
This was previously a 233MHz Pentium MMX. I scrapped the parts, keeping the video card, monitor, cd drives, and sound card. Everything else was brand new and I spent less than $600 for all of it.
So, what's the theme here?
For not even a quarter of the cost of a new Mac, I put together a whole new machine, and more than 2 years later, it's still fast, efficient, and responsive to virtually everything I throw at it. If I need to upgrade to a faster processor without replacing the mobo, I can. Even if I were to upgrade the CPU, hard drives, video card, sound card, and memory, I still wouldn't come even CLOSE to the price of a G4.
Why is this significant?
Because my PC will still outperform the most current Apple systems. Should I decide to build an entirely new system another year or two from now, that new system will still outperform a new Mac (yes, even the upcoming G5) for considerably lesser cost. I'm still getting high-quality parts, eye-pleasing case and monitor, and all the software I need, but i'm not spending a ridiculous amount of money for a powerful, stable system.
"Obsolete" to me means "no longer able to be productive within the limits of my machine". We've had friends over who've sat down at my girlfriend's 500MHz system and even they have said that they're surprised at how fast and responsive it is under Win2k.
Imo, neither of these systems is even near obsolete. If you can show me a Mac system that's still responsive when running Softimage|XSI, Photoshop, and Mozilla Firebird simultaneously, then I might take the price of an Apple system a little more seriously.
I'm not trying to claim that PCs are the most godlike systems ever, but for someone within my budget (which believe me, isn't much), it's the most flexible when it comes to available applications, processing power, and productivity. Even if I have a larger budget, I'd still likely choose a PC, because I don't feel, at this point, that paying a premium for a Mac is justified for what the system is giving you back. Computers should be a price = power situation, where what you pay out is directly in correlation with what you get. Paying out nearly $4000 for a new system that barely competes with a system that I custom-built 2 years ago just isn't justifiable for my budget, or my work.
I'd pay a shitload for a high-end x86-based system, but that should mean sheer fucking POWER. At the rate that Apple charges for their systems, I could probably build a dual-Xeon system that's still cheaper and smokes the shit out of Apple, my old 1.5Ghz, *and* my girlfriend's 500Mhz.
Why not? Seeing as how Xerox licensed it and everything. That's right, stop believing your IRC buddies--Apple legally got what they got from Xerox.
It's just like the false Bill Gates "640kb" quote. People refuse to believe otherwise because it fits their agendas.
Next.
"Sufferin' succotash."
The activity viewer is a nice GUI improvement over the Process Viewer in the Jaguar Utilities folder (which is just a simple GUI for ps). This will make a nice helper for telephone tech support people trying to get grandma's computer problem licked. Note that the title bar of this window isn't "metal" or "blue courderoy" as we know them today. Looking at other screen shots this appears to either be a tip off that these are fake or an indication of a subtle interface theme evolution.
Expose' looks like a neat feature but probably more complex than most people will want to deal with. I'm also curious how the corner activation behavior will work with multiple screens.
The one panel Finder window looks like a very cool user interface improvement to tackle problems of novice users ("I have to dig so deep to get to my home folder" and "why can't I have a simple desktop like OS 9") The new highlighting method (blue rounded rectangle around the filename) looks like a nice eye candy improvement.
System Preferences has gotten rid of ColorSync, My Account, and Login Items. Combined Desktop and Screen Savers. Combined mouse & keyboard. Added a Print & Fax icon. Added icons for Security and Expose'. Hopefully this indicates a trend of trying to integrate tools from the Utilities folder into the System Preferences.
While all of these are nice changes (and I will be first in line to buy my copy), I don't think these changes alone are compelling justifications of a large upgrade price for an experienced user. I hope Apple will backport any security and bug fix updates for Panther back to Jaguar for those users who don't find the upgrade makes sense.
OBSERVATION: In System Preferences, several things seem to be missing. Login Items, ColorSync, and Internet don't seem to fit in with anything else. I love the idea of .Mac and Print & Fax being their own panels, though.
OBSERVATION: The "More Info" button in the About Finder window, which launches Apple System Profiler, is missing.
OBSERVATION: Corners for activating Exposé would conflict with the screen saver in a confusing way. Also, if Exposé is a real feature, it's a development code name - no way in hell Apple would ship it with that name.
OBSERVATION: System Preferences is an inactive window (titlebar widgets aren't colored), and the titlebar is not translucent.
Observation: The brushed metal Finder window includes what appears vaguely to be a list of mounted volumes (along with a Network icon). However, the disk image icon is that of an image file, not a mounted volume!
OBSERVATION: The Applications, Documents, etc. links in the aforementioned Finder window aren't vertically aligned very well.
OBSERVATION: In the same Finder window, the Xdrive volume is selected in blue, and what appears to be an Applications (Mac OS 9) folder behind it (no menu transparency!) is ALSO selected, making it unclear which item the displayed menu would apply to. It seems REALLY strange to have a toolbar button with a menu that contains precisely the same menu items that are also in the main system menu bar. Contextual menus are neat time-savers, but that's just stupid. Apple does seem to like non-descript graphical labels like that, though (see iTunes - grrrr!).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
A better precedent for your argument is the canonical Lotus vs. Borland case, in which case it was ruled that a menu system was not artistic expression protected by copyright. Note that the first trial judge ruled against Borland, saying words like "Cut" and "Paste" could be changed to, e.g., "Snip" and "Dupe." Had his ruling stood, we'd have had to learn a new menu system for every software company, raising the barrier of entry for new software companies who would have had to invent new words and keyboard shortcuts for "File/Open" = Ctrl-O, and innovation would be even more stifled than it already is. Can you imagine shopping for cars if each company had a different mapping for left pedal = break, right pedal = gas?
You tell me how "whilst" differs from "while," and I'll stop calling you a pretentious jackass.
Actually, I think you're simply posting personl opinion and arguing personal preference more than anything concrete.
.tmp, while leaving the rest alone, for example? With no command line whatsoever, and no really good file manager, this is rather difficult. (Writing an Applescript to do it isn't exactly a user-friendly option either.)
I found MacOS9 much less than a "well-refined user interface". Why? Well, let me list a few items that come to mind:
1. When MacOS boots, only some extensions are shown loading up (with the associated puzzle piece icons). Why are some hidden while others get icons? Any logic to it whatsoever? Why is there no way to find out what one is during the boot sequence? As it is, one has to go to extensions manager and match up the picture to an item description to discover what it is.
2. MacOS lacked a good file management tool/utility. Want to delete all files in a given folder that start with a4 and end with an extension of
3. MacOS lacked a number of Internet-related tools. Personal web sharing in OS9 was far from "robust", for example. FTP or telnet, non-existant. OS X is light-years ahead in this arena.
4. MacOS numerical error codes were far from user-friendly or steps "forward in usability". Error 192 in Launcher? Not very intuitive.
5. The often-used "trick" of making an action happen only when the mouse button is held down for more than a couple seconds isn't obvious at all. One never really knows if holding the button down on an object will accomplish something or not. (Well, not until you try it and memorize the fact that it's useful for a specific item.)
Personally, I think the brushed metal "theme" looks pretty slick in programs like iTunes. I might nor care for it if EVERY program I used in OS X had brushed metal all over it, but it's fine for Apple's own commerical apps. Maybe it'll become a quick identifier than you're using an Apple-branded app?