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Panther Analysis Getting Underway
Durin_Deathless writes "Think Secret has posted their first article analyzing the changes from Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.3. In this first installment, they look at the changes to the Installation, System Requirements, the Finder, and some other things.
They have some nice images available too."
I'm disappointed that Apple has forced the extremely ugly brushed metal on us. Aqua is beautiful; why dilute that beauty by replacing it with some ugly, unrealistic looking texture?
Isn't Apple violating it's own HIG by making the Finder metal? I though you could only make programs that emulate physical devices metal.
fsck -u
I just hope Apple makes the brushed metal window frames optional/themeable/skinable etc. Apparently (as per a recent /. article as this one's /.'ed) they are not customizable and more importantly they are not just limited to Apple apps the way that Safari, et al is today in 10.2. All apps pick up the new look and some of us are not into that new look as much.
Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
This was the final "I really don't need multiple desktops" shortcut for me. But you're right, it looks like Expose puts another nail in that coffin.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
This Funmac.com thread has a bunch of shots of the new XCode development package. Both Project Builder and Interface Builder are featured at great length.
I am not who I say you are.
Here's at least one way do encrypt your home directory in Jaguar - a little less tricky is encrypting only particular directories like you speak of. I believe it is done by mounting an encrypted volume, so if you don't log in no other user will be able to see the directory contents.
I think in Panther they just made this feature accessible "to the rest of us" with no trickery to make it work. Perhaps they wanted to wait for a journaled file system to make this feature official, lest people accidentally corrupt a whole encrypted directory bundle...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I've installed Panther onto 2 different boxes and during both installations HFS+ (not journaled) was an available option, and that is what I chose... I don't see how everyone is being forced to use HFS+ with journaling, because that was not my experience at all. On one box, I formatted the HD, and I installed onto an existing partition with the other. In neither circumstance was a journaled FS required..
I have been using Panther for a week and have found many good improvements.
;-P Just being silly.
1. File browser (a la windows) is fast and can be changed back to a "normal" window.
2. Expose is brilliant. Though it may conflict with the screensaver settings when corners are used. I personally like using the f-keys for expose and the corners for the screensaver (activation and deactivation).
3. Faxing is as easy as printing and saving as PDF. You can also have received faxes mailed or printed. Faxing is very very easy in 10.3.
4. Preview.app is faster and works in a similar fashion as Acrobat Reader. Nice.
5. Fast user switching is just brilliant (graphically). It will be very useful when you have a shared machine.
6. Secure "Empty Trash" is a nice feature. I am not sure if I will use it...but someone in my office thinks it is the Holy Grail. I am not that excited about it...but it is probably useful.
7. Color Coded Folders/Files (the text is color coded in actuality) is nice and saves me time when digging for a file or group of files.
8. The "eject" menu icon in the right hand side of the menu bar is interesting. But it only worked with the drive tray. It would be nice if it would eject mounted items and servers.
9. User customization of desktop pics and colors is refined and much friendlier.
10. The print center is much improved.
This is the bad stuff...
1. The fax feature did not integrate well with the address book. BUT...you can have one machine as the dedicated fax machine and all other computers in the office can fax through it.
2. Some photoshop filter controls did not draw correctly on the screen or didn't show up at all.
3. There seemed to be some cut and paste clipboard errors. It seemed to show up in Safari and the Address Book.
4. Quicken 2003 seems to have strange behavior when used in 10.3. But it is usable.
Features that will hopefully show up in the actual release:
1. Piles. I know they seem trivial. But I would like it.
2. Themes. I really like the idea of customizing my OS and maybe tone down Aqua a bit.
3. Multiple docks. One for office apps. One for games. One for graphical/web apps. And in the darkness bind them...
I know this is a preview release...but it is very stable and usable. I cannot wait until the actual release. The fax sharing and abilities are worth the price of the upgrade. The rest is just gravy. My $.02.
my apologies. the links were supposed to go to the front page of my news, but my news page automatically archives articles every month! so since today is the first it didn't show up. here is a direct link to apple's expose info. and here is a direct link to my news article.
- tristan
I am posting this from a late 2001 iBook running Panther. It's the last iBook with the crappy 8mb Rage video (so no Quartz Extreme). I like Panther. I like it a lot. Some nuggets:
* Expose rocks. It's awesome. I couldn't imagine working without it again.
* Mail.app has been made a little bit prettier, and a little bit more functional.
* Terminal.app has become usable as my primary terminal. You can now configure it to send Page-Down and Page-Up to the session instead of to Terminal.app's scrollbars.
* I don't like the milky look. I want the pinstripes back.
* The new finder is 2048X better. It's great.
* I really wish they would either go with all brushed metal or all not - at least for the instances that go against the user interface guidelines. Either way, give me back the pinstripes.
* The activity monitor is cool. You can change the colors on those graphs we saw - why they default it with those colors that look like ass, I don't know.
* iTunes rocks. I don't know that much has changed, but that just had to be thrown out there.
* Safari 1.0 (also available for Jaguar, I know) is the best browser I've ever used. They've made some great speed improvements.
* The OS in general just feels a little bit snappier. With my aging iBook, any speed improvements get huge ++'s from me.
To me this was the best part of the Panther update, after Expose.
I have a lot of drives that have been formatted as NTFS. If a computer pukes and dies, it's great to be able to back up the data to my laptop (mac) rather than having to take the drive to a PC to pull the data off.
As of yet the drives are read only, although it does have a non-functional (as of yet) authentication option so who knows.
..Can be found in a forum thread here (linked from a MacRumors article)
That's not undocumented. That has been the standard functionality of the OS since at least System 7.0. Holding down option while activating an app hides the app you just left. Command-Option activating an app shows only that app.
t'nera semordnilap
You might want to try calibrating the color on your laptop. The tab names are quite readable on my powerbook.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Look here.
It seems that someone missed this, and that "piles" is actually the "Expose" feature in Panther. I got to play with this last night, and it is pretty cool even though it ran like shit (and was expected to) on my spare G4/350 with a feeble video card.
~Philly
- Are part of the digital hub
- Emulate a real world device
- Use the "playlist paradigm"
Therefore, Panther is #3, as it has the new sidebar."When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love has always won..." ~ Mohandas K. Gandhi
Sure, QuickTime 4's UI was kind of bad, but have youy checked out Windows Media Player 9 lately? Talk about bad interface -- they didn't even include the ability to fast forward or rewind!
~jeff
To get rid of that, i would recommend that you head over to http://www.haxies.com and get the APE program you see there and the deMetalizer offered there. They also have several other programs that are VERY nice for interface changes (making the dock clear for one). It is a great help, if you hate the metal thing so much. It can get rid of all metal on the desktop but iTunes and DVD player (there may be more, but i don't use them).
Try http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/finder.html - there are plenty of nice screenshots on Apple's website.
A very useful "no need for getting under the hood" app and worth the donation just for the Aqua.
You know what?
yet. I haven't seen anyone mention this, but I realized the other day that since Jaguar is fully 32-bit, you should be able to take 64-bit hardware and run two full instances of Jaguar on it in parallel.
Based on your post, I am assuming you are new to the techie side of things, so I hope I don't offend.
However, it doesn't work like this, a 64bit CPU is not two 32bit CPUS. Besides, running multiple copies of Jaguar would gain you what exactly?
The architecture of OSX allows for multiple process and applications already, running OSX twice would be silly and redundant.
I don't have the bandwidth to flushout this problem, but, after running Panther (and LOVING IT!), I lost a two drive RAID partition.
I'm posting this for posterity, not to be critical. Hopefully this will be modded "informative" if anything.
Running a PowerMac G4 450MHz/1GB/2x78GB+1x28GB. The (2) 78GB drives were RAIDed to a single partition with 10.2.6 running smoothly even with heavy Classic operation. Some admin duties include Macintosh Manager and Workgroup Manager.
Installed Panther on the 28GB drive and booted onto that OS. Things were running very smoothly and fast(!). Logged into Workgroup Manager and exited. Logged into Macintosh Manager and this is when trouble started.
My theory is that, because Macintosh Manager auto-mounts the shared volume of the server you are connecting to, this set up a peculiar scenario that Panther was unfamilar with. The next action that I performed was to access a different shared volume (which had been previously mounted and operating fine). That is when I got the wheel of death.
Thinking it was Just Another Wheel, I continued working (Excel, Classic apps, and more) with little trouble. After waiting long enough, I began Force Quitting apps (including the Finder) until all that remained was the Wheel.
Rebooting didn't help, nor did Shutting Down, zapping PRAM, or Disk Utility (which consistently responded with Unknown Error (-9998).
Various efforts were fruitless. Ended up reinstalling 10.2.2, upgrading to 10.2.6. Things are back to normal less data loss.
My bad. I should be more careful.
64 bit means numbers can be bigger, and address sizes can be bigger. But numbers and addresses must
still occupy contiguous bytes in memory, so there is no provision for multiple instances. Now, the OS may provide as many instances of itself as it wants providing that the OS is written to do this.
Oh, and Boromir was Faramir's Brother. Not his son.
Denethor was their father.
Disk Copy has supported encrypted partitions (eg: files that mount as drives when you open them) since 10.1, which is what I've been using.
I have not noticed performance issues with using them, except for when I occasionally copy a 20-50 megabyte movie onto them. Then I go "oh yeah, that's encrypted"
I'd prefer more than AES 128, and hopefully the keychain will be removable (Eg: you can put it on a flash USB device so that absent of it, the computer has no keys) in Panther.
Security in OS X is pretty good yet still conveneint, even in Jaguar.
Yeah, and you guys panned the ipod too: http://apple.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/23
unsanity (www.unsanity.com) makes a little free utility that will switch the brushed metal look to the normal aqua look in any cocoa app. I use it for Safari and iChat, and it works like a charm.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Ok, well I should be able to answer the mail one. When I was poking arround with it, the only thing I *noticed* that changed was that the spam filtering, threads, and how they did the preferences (atleast it stood out to me as different). I didnt notice anything different with searching, but then again, I didnt try either.
X11 was a seperate install just like it is now. How well it is intigrated is a different thing which I didnt get a chance to play with.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
Having been at WWDC, I can point to other more likely culprits:
- The text display system has been optimized to hell.
- The Quartz graphics engine has also taken truckloads of optimizations (finally it doesn't invalidate the union of all invalidated rectangles. That was Evil).
Some other things might have also gotten a speed check, but those two should make using Panther a better deal than Jaguar for most mac people (particularly those with older machines).
Hope that helps...
You still can.