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."
You can easily enable/disable the brushed-metal theme on OSX apps, Apple or third-party. See here for details.
Practice Kind Randomness and Beautiful Acts of Nonsense.
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.
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.
In general this is true (it works on Safari on Panther for example). Unfortunatly the Finder.app bundle does not appear to contain a nib file for the main Finder window. It contains a load of other nibs though. It looks like the main windows are created programatically so are not as easy to swich back to aqua.