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."

Comments

"They have some nice images available too."

[PhoenixK7]

Translation: It'll only take 5 seconds to slashdot 'em.

Re:"They have some nice images available too."

[Bob Wehadababyitsabo]

Quote: "Posted by CmdrTaco on Tue Jul 01, '03 10:34 AM" /.'ed by 10:40. Not too far off the mark!

Re:"They have some nice images available too."

[Narf Narf]

Yes, it is so dead. Did anyone mirror the images?

Re:"They have some nice images available too."

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong question.

The right one is: Did anyone mirror the images and is dumb enough to post link on slashdot?

Re:"They have some nice images available too."

[drinkypoo]

They are well-slashdotted at this point. I guess the name of the site is appropriate though. "This website will self-destruct in five seconds."

Well, that alieviates my main worry

[squiggleslash]

While the format of a Places sidebar won't appeal to everyone, just as column view doesn't appeal to everyone, Apple is providing users with a number of ways to customize the look and function of windows. A user who simply wants a plain window with no toolbar or sidebar, with basic folder icons that open up new windows when clicked, like in Mac OS 9, can still do that.

That's a real relief. It's not that Panther's new system isn't better (I don't know if it is or not), but when one's been using a particular, familiar, system since the Commodore Amiga, it's good to know that system is still available if I turn out not to like Panther's new way of doing things.

That really was the only worry I had. I don't have strong views on Brushed Metal, I like the lower-key stripes I've seen, so I'll almost certainly upgrade.

Panther before LongHorn??

[jkrise]

Looks like reverse bio-engineering. Predators normally come after the prey!

Re:Panther before LongHorn??

[commodoresloat]

Dangerous, perhaps, but the panther is a fucking CAT. That poor steer's entrails would be all over the ground before he knew what hit him.

Brushed metal

[Bob Wehadababyitsabo]

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.

Re:Brushed metal

[Znonymous Coward]

It's not like all system running 10.2 will suddenly rm -r / themselves when Mac OS X 10.3 comes out. If you don't like it, you don't have to upgrade. Mac OS X 10.2 will still work when 10.3 is released.

Re:Brushed metal

[Mikey-San]

It was supposed to be for apps that emulate or interface with real-world devices.

But you know, the Human Interface Guidelines are just that--guidelines. They aren't scripture.

Then again, where are we without rules to follow? UI consistency is worth the effort, right?

I find these both interesting ideas, not really subscribing to the HIG as the Bible and not really seeing them as something to look at but not pay attention to.

Thoughts? :-)

Re:Brushed metal

[Squareball]

I'm disappointed that Apple has shut down the creator of yZdock!

Re:Brushed metal

[drinkypoo]

Perhaps calling it "Y'z Dock" was a mistake. The Afterstep folks understood, and called it a Wharf.

Re:Brushed metal

[mblase]

It was supposed to be for apps that emulate or interface with real-world devices.

Like an iPod?

Re:Brushed metal

[Dr. Spork]

Yeah, and I think that the brushed metal stuff looks totally awesome. I can't imagine the same apps done in the "candy" look could possibly be prettier.

Re: Brushed metal

[gidds]

I much prefer the brushed metal look -- I use Metallifizer to add it to as many other apps as possible. By being that bit darker, I find it easier on the eye than the brightness of Aqua's paper look, the smoothness is also more comfortable than those ugly horizontal lines, and the lack of colour less distracting.

Of course, I'm not trying to persuade you to prefer brushed metal too -- it's a matter of personal preference, and you like what you like. But don't assume that everyone else hates it too, because I don't :)

Re:Brushed metal

[Feral Bueller]

I installed 10.3 and have been running it for 6 days now.

I was initially concerned about the prospect of a brushed metal UI: I hate the way it looks in the iApps, etc.

I was surprised to see that most of the actual Finder windows don't look like brushed metal nearly as much as I thought they would. If you look at the current pinstriped window motif and imagine it all grey instead of striped, that's what it looks like.

I booted back into 10.2.6 today (I'm running 10.3 on my old "Classic" partition - 4GB) and it feels kind of gaudy in comparison.

In any event, it's really more "Platinum2K" then "Brushed Metal" -- I'm looking forward to the release version.

Re:Brushed metal

[gerbache]

So, I for one like the brushed metal look. I know not everyone likes it, but I think it's kinda cool looking and still fits the general theme of OS X pretty well. Then again, I really don't have a problem with the mixture of brushed metal and pinstripe. I suppose I just don't notice it as much as some people do.

Re:Brushed metal

[yerricde]

We've seen app developers flock quickly to new frameworks included with each new version Mac OS X, rendering older versions of Mac OS X unable to run new applications.

Re:Brushed metal

[HTH NE1]

It was supposed to be for apps that emulate or interface with real-world devices.

And was one of the justifications Apple had for killing the iCommune plug-in for iTunes: the license to create plug-ins was only for creating interfaces to peripherals, and the Internet didn't qualify.

Then came Safari, which sported the brushed metal interface. Suddenly, Apple feels the Web is a peripheral device?

Apple, don't expect developers to play by the rules when you fail to do so yourself.

Brushed Metal window frames

[terraformer]

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.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

You can easily enable/disable the brushed-metal theme on OSX apps, Apple or third-party. See here for details.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[bedheading]

I'm running Panther and all applications do NOT use the brushed metal interface. Only apps that choose to do so, as it has always been. Give it a chance and I don't think the brushed metal look will bother you after 10 minutes or so. I think it makes the finder more distinctive and easier to use. My only complaint (and it's not a harsh one) is that there is a lot of wasted space in the finder window- they definitely could have made the design more efficient, but in the end it doesn't really matter, it's just a nit-pick.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[Wyatt Earp]

I'm running Brushed Metal right now on 10.2.6

Apple isn't going to ship the OS themeable since that might confuse users and make for more support calls - Now Ma'am, what theme are you in? Theme Ma'am, what color are the windows around all your shit?

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[squiggleslash]

You don't absolutely need a third party app, in general, at least not for Cocoa apps or some OS X only Carbon apps.

Install the developer tools if you haven't already. Right click on the App you want to change, and select Show Package Contents. Go into Contents->Resources, and then look for .nib files both in that directory and the English.lproj (or whatever language you're using.)

By opening the .nibs, you can edit all aspects of the windows relating to them. Use the Info window to select/deselect the brushed metal theme.

FWIW, I think Safari looks better with the Aqua look.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[robbieduncan]

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.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[BitGeek]

I think you're mistaken. Since Jaguar (10.2) the brushed metal appearance has been there for any programmer to use in their app, or to not use.

Once an app is built with it, though, it cannot be changed by the user (except with third party tools.)

OTOH, I don't see why people don't like brushed metal-- it makes sense for a certain class of apps, and Apple has been using it consistently for them. I think finder is one of those apps.

You could think of it as "Single window apps get metal, others don't".

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[cosmo7]

Once an app is built with it, though, it cannot be changed by the user (except with third party tools.)

Depends. If the window is in a nib then there's no easy way (that I know of) to change the styleMask other than including two copies of the window in the nib. If it's created on the fly then obviously so is the styleMask and that can be set to whatever you want. A more philosophical aspect is whether you want the user to be able to change the appearance of your application.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[bnenning]

You could think of it as "Single window apps get metal, others don't".

Finder and Safari aren't single window.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[squiggleslash]

Neither is iTunes, the most famous brushed metal app of them all...

I think we can probably forget the single-window=brushed-metal assumption...

(Off the top of my head, I think iMovie is the only Apple app I've used that's both single window and brushed metal. There's probably others, but I haven't used them.)

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[Uart]

can you point me to more detailed instructions on how to do that?

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[squiggleslash]

I can't point you at a write-up. But it's just a matter of installing the developer tools and then hunting for .nib files in the packages that make up Cocoa apps (you can get into the package using Right-Mouse-Click->Show Package Contents on the App's icon.)

Really, it's nothing more than that.

Re:Brushed Metal window frames

[Pius II.]

And did you notice what kind of .nibs those are? Carbon.
I wanted a Cocoa Finder :-( *cry*.

This looks like a strong release

[cuijian]

I'm really excited about Panther. The finder screen shots make it look like they have really gotten file navigation right. Previous iterations were too geeky, exposing the average user to /Library, /System, and /Users when most people just want to get to their documents and applications.

Expose is a great example of the combination of Apple's design sense and what you can do with the Quartz compositing engine. Windows scale down so you can see all of your open windows, or all of the documents in an application. I don't think its even technically possible to do that on windows because they lack an alpha channel.

I've used iChat AV and it is soooo much better than windows messenger. Unlike messenger, which forces me to a single postage-stamp sized video window, I can scale my video to any size and even go full screen. Audio conferencing seems to be pretty clear and will be great for when I'm on dial-up or talking to someone w/o a camera.

I can't wait to see more.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[Brother Grifter]

Windows had an alpha channel since windows 2000. It's just not hardware accelerated like Jaguar (and soon Panther).

From what I've seen of Longhorn, it has abilities similar to Quartz Extreme. For example, they have a rippling window demo they showed at MS's last conference.

But how useful is rippling windows? I think in general, when it comes to technology, it's not a matter of who has the best tech, but who uses their tech in the most useful way, which Apple seems to do.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[arkanes]

The alpha channel in Win2k is accellerated (use it on hardware with hardware transparency, and then on hardware with it and see the difference in performance, especially resizing), but Quartz Extreme is a whole other deal - the desktop is rendered as an OpenGL scene. Thats why doing stuff like scaling the whole desktop is easy (although you can do something like that pretty simply in Windows, too). Longhorn supposedly renders the desktop using DirectX in a similiar manner.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[drinkypoo]

Correction: Window alphaing is hardware accelerated on Windows 2000, at least with the use of an appropriate nVidia card. I don't know about ATI. I understand that radeons will do 2d alpha, but I have no first-hand knowledge of whether the windows drivers will do that.

Rippling windows isn't very useful but when stereoscopic goggles (through MEMS laser scanning or perhaps OLED panels) become cheaper, and ditto for some kind of data input gloves with force feedback, we're all going to really want this functionality. Imagine being able to place windows anywhere around your head that you liked, or perhaps all over your room, and then manipulating them by hand rather than by mouse.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[MrFreak]

Sorry Longhorn, MacOS X has been able to do rippling, rotating windows for awhile now. In fact, CoreGraphics has an undocumented call specifically for this, CGSetWindowWarp(), that the Genie effect uses.

There were several good examples of this call used at MacHack this year, and interested parties can download some of the hacks here.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

Imagine being able to place windows anywhere around your head that you liked, or perhaps all over your room, and then manipulating them by hand rather than by mouse.

I don't want to think about where pop-up ads are going to appear! If they can appear anywhere in my room, at least.

And the only way to deal with them will probably still involve only my middle finger!

Re:This looks like a strong release

[Roto-Rooter Man]

Imagine being able to place windows anywhere around your head that you liked, or perhaps all over your room, and then manipulating them by hand rather than by mouse.

Also a little wood ball can come up through a tube and tell you the victim and perpetrator of any murder.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[TheNetAvenger]

I've used iChat AV and it is soooo much better than windows messenger. Unlike messenger, which forces me to a single postage-stamp sized video window, I can scale my video to any size and even go full screen

Funny my version of MSN messenger supports three video sizes, up to 640x480... Is the reviewer just a newbie with Windows or just trying to hype up iChat?

Re:This looks like a strong release

[TheNetAvenger]

Sorry Longhorn, MacOS X has been able to do rippling, rotating windows for awhile now

And there have been third party addins for Windows2000 and XP that have had these features for several years as well. Stardock just to name one off the top of my head.

The Mac does not have an exclusive on this stuff guys. Just because 'you' have not seen it, does not mean it doesn't exist.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[Elwood P Dowd]

Stereoscopic goggles have a number of problems aside from price:

1) You have to wear them.
2) They suck.
3) You have to wear them and they suck.

We're all going to want this functionality (I do) long long before we have stereoscopic goggles.

(BTW. It is now completely impossible for me to type "goggle" without first typing "google" and then deleting, due to muscle memory.)

Re:This looks like a strong release

[Pope]

Previous iterations were too geeky, exposing the average user to /Library, /System, and /Users when most people just want to get to their documents and applications.

You could always set the default Finder window to go to a user's Home directory, it's right in the Preferences: "New Finder Window shows: []Home []Computer. There's a radio button to pick which one you want.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[drinkypoo]

Goggles are an interim step. The next stage will be contact lenses with a targeting system of some sort, and then eventually the eyes will be targeted directly.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[Elwood P Dowd]

Still, we'll want this functionality for things like Expose^' long before we have stereoscopic output devices.

Re:This looks like a strong release

[cpeterso]

Here are some screenshots of Longhorn's waving windows demo:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/longhorn_prev iew_2003.asp

interesting

[Boromir son of Faram]

I see that they don't touch on the 64- vs. 32-bit issue. Not surprising, since the 64-bit G5s aren't available yet. I'm curious as to how much of an impact that will make.

Also, as cool as Panther looks, I expect Jaguar to stick around for a while 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. Give each instance its own CPU on a dual G5 system, and you have two fully functional OS X systems running in real time on a single boxen!

I wouldn't even be surprised to see Apple start shipping systems in this configuration. It's great for companies on a budget (and who isn't these days?).

Re:interesting

[platypus]

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.

Hmm, I'd like to know what kind of esoteric idea of "bitness" of cpus let's you conclude that.
At least, you seem to share it with one moderator.

Re:interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait until I can run 8 copies of Commodore Basic on a G5.

Of course it'll never happen, because Steve Jobs insists on keeping the specs of his beloved "computers" secret, locked in a safe deep in his dungeon office, watched over by his gimp.

I hear there is a two year back log of Mac users waiting to be the gimp.

Re:interesting

[Znonymous Coward]

That has got to be the dumbest idea I have ever heard... Ever!

Re:interesting

[avalys]

Ok, it doesn't work that way. That's like saying two arms is better than one because you can reach things twice as far away.

Just like having two arms, having 64 bits is an advantage, but not for the reasons you state.

Re:interesting

[moonbender]

Also, as cool as Panther looks, I expect Jaguar to stick around for a while 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. Give each instance its own CPU on a dual G5 system, and you have two fully functional OS X systems running in real time on a single boxen!

Running two (32- or 64-bit) processes in parallel on a dual-CPU machine, okay. But running two 32-bit processes in parallel on one 64-bit CPU? Um, no, that's not how it works. In fact, it's so stupid an idea that I am willing to think that I am misreading your message and it's not even what you meant.

I'm also not sure why exactly a typical user would want to run two operating systems on a single machine, especially not if it's the same OS in both cases and none is virtual. Meh.

Re:interesting

[Endareth]

64 bit refers to the size of addresses that pointers can reference. Check out this HP site for an easy read summary of the differences.

Re:interesting

[Maudib]

Hmmm..... Thats a really great idea. Should work too (ignore those jealous PC users who tell you its technically infeasable).

However, I would be concerned about Apple's legal department, as such an amazing prospect of running two 32bit operating systems on one 64bit cpu simultaneously is clearly destined to be the focal point of Steve's 04 Keynote.

Mac users, sweet, cuddly, but not to bright. They remind me of Golden Retrievers.

Re:interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

The only flaw with your idea is that each copy of OS X will only get to use half a mouse button.

Re:interesting

[AssFace]

I hope you are happy in shattering my hopes of ever reaching twice as far with my two arms.

Now I can't reach twice as far until I get four arms.

Re:interesting

[godawful]

you can reach twice as far with two arms then you could with one arm (sometimes).. the idea with two is that you stand in the middle reaching in both directions. now granted this doesn't work in all circumstances..
the second arm, i think, would need to be used to hold yourself onto something that one couldn't reach with the one arm by itself.

not enough coffee

Re:interesting

[TheNetAvenger]

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.

Re:interesting

[MrTangent]

Isn't Boromir the son of Denethor, and not Faramir? Faramir is Boromir's brother, if my LOTR knowledge is correct.

No offense, but if you're going to name yourself after LOTR, you should get it right. Heh.

Re:interesting

[wavedeform]

Well, just like with multiple processors, you don't get a true doubling with a dual-arm system, there is some overhead. But you can reach two things in opposite directions simultaneously! The combined span is almost double!

The only way to do this with a single-tasking arm system is to actually pivot at one of the lowest levels of the OS... er, body.

Re:interesting

[wavedeform]

Ok, Dune-boy,

You can pick on Mac users all you want, they're used to it (and generally know the difference between to, too and two, too). But don't pick on Golden Retrievers!

Check out dog intelligence rankings

Re:interesting

[Tengoo]

Besides, running multiple copies of Jaguar would gain you what exactly?

Using the bizarro logic from above, I wonder if it could benefit that poor guy who is continuously copying his 18 meg Photoshop file.

Re:interesting

[jacrawf]

It has improved. Not very long ago, there would have been at least five or six positive moderations on a clueless post like that one.

Re:interesting

[good soldier svejk]

Check out dog intelligence rankings

Understanding of New Commands: Less than 5 repetitions.

Obey First Command: 95% of the time or better.

1 Border Collie

2 Poodle

On-topic, I can't believe nobody realizes the ancestor post is a troll.

On dogs, ROTFL! Obviously the people who did these rankings never owned any of these animals. I have two border collies. One will certainly learn a command in five repetitions or less, but if she thinks she is going to get something out of it (other than a "good girl") she tries to move things along by performing every command she can think of before you ask. While she spazzes out, sitting, spinning shaking hands etc., the other dog drops into gear and starts herding her. Good luck getting her to even look at you then. She is what they call a "sticky" sheepdog. You can't turn her off. If she isn't herding she will at least stare at you blankly while you give her commands. No actual obedience though. Too bad because she has exceptional "eye" (herding ability). I once watched her herd a pack of ten Border Collies/Aussies into a little knot in the middle of a field.

I also have a poodle. He learns pretty quickly, but obedience isn't an accurate description. More like accomodation. He does exactly what you say right up until the first second your back is turned. Then he's on to his own agenda.

If you want to challenge everything you think you know about dogs, try this book on for size.

Re:interesting

[King Babar]

The only flaw with your idea is that each copy of OS X will only get to use half a mouse button.

For the last time, if this really bugs you, just buy yourself a decent USB 3-button mouse!

That way, each copy of OS X will get to use 1.5 mouse buttons.

Re:interesting

[operagost]

The same one that led Atari to conclude that THEIR Jaguar was "64-bit".

Re:interesting

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

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.

And I would like to know: Is that FULL SPEED 32bit or HIGH SPEED 32 bit?

Re:interesting

[wavedeform]

I can't believe nobody realizes the ancestor post is a troll

Why do you think we're talking about dogs, now?

Re:interesting

[the argonaut]

Mac users also generally know how to spell Muad'Dib

Expose!

[OmniVector]

I've been using the Panther preview for about a week now. and I have to say that Expose is one of the coolest ideas in the past few years I've seen come out of apple.

It basically eliminates the need for multiple desktops. I'm sure you're probably saying: "Well why not just use multiple desktops in the first place." The best answer to that is, apple likes to make simple/easy to use software. Multiple desktops are too much of a poweruser feature, and are confusing to use for the first time for many -- and that first time is KEY to adoption (afterall, the first impression you get about something is most likely to be the most important). Much like apple's aversion to tabbed interfaces, though tabbed browsing is one of those exceptions apple can't get past because it's too entrenched in browsers today.

I can give you more info but you're best looking at apple's preview.

Re:Expose!

[squiggleslash]

One of the underdocumented features of the dock is that if you Option-Command-Click any of the icons, all other windows are hidden and that app's items are unhidden. Of course, it's probably less nice for people using a seperate mouse (I have an IBM trackpoint keyboard.)

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.

Re:Expose!

[Ender Ryan]

I use multiple desktops so I can quickly switch between completely different tasks(eg. programming / graphic design). I may have 5 windows open for one task and 5 for another, so I keep them on separate desktops. Expose would not be a suitable replacement for that.

OTOH, don't get me wrong, Expose looks very, very nice, and would be very useful to me I think. I wish I had Expose for GNOME :)

Re:Expose!

[OmniVector]

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.

Re:Expose!

[TomorrowPlusX]

I have a question for you, since you've got panther.

I installed LightSwitchX ( http://www.proteron.com/liteswitchx/ ) since I really, *really* didn't like the default command-tab implementation in OSX. As a programmer I do a lot of switching back and forth between an editor and command line, and the default command-tab made that almost impossible. Sure, it was possible, but it was a pain.

So... I'm wondering... does panther provide a useful command tab implementation?

I know I might sound snarky here, but every OS I've used seriously ( I come from BeOS, then linux ) has used the traditional stacking-order based app switching, and the OSX way of using dock ordering seems, well, *broken* to me.

Oh, and one more thing -- how much 3rd party stuff does Panther break? See, I also make good use of fruit menu ( http://www.unsanity.com/haxies/fruitmenu/ ), since I like being able to put apps and folders into my apple menu (I got hooked on it when I spent a short time on Mac OS 8, long ago). Does Panther break 3rd party stuff like that?

OK, thanks in advance. I'm quite curious. I love OSX, and use it exclusively now. But frankly I've come to need lightswitch and fruitmenu to make the system "feel" right.

Re:Expose!

[nullard]

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.

Re:Expose!

[jeffehobbs]

I think Exposé is great for managing windows, but it would actually be the best way to watch TV/channel surf that I've ever seen...

~jeff

Re:Expose!

[Anonymous Coward]

It basically eliminates the need for multiple desktops.

Speaking of virtual desktops, I've set my Panther up to have multiple users up with different environments: Admin, Web, [myusername], etc. Then have started using the "Fast Login" feature to switch between environments. Sounds like a kludge, I know, but I'm enjoying the multiple Docks optimized for different purposes, multiple desktop paterns and multiple permissions.

Re:Expose!

[Kyaphas]

After checking out the preview, it does indeed look cool, but as for eliminating the need for multiple desktops, I dunno about that. Didn't Apple say that the "Snapback" feature of Safari would do the same thing to tabbed browsing, and since they had the snapback, there was no way they'd do tabbed browsing?

Looking over the preview, if I had to choose between the two (and being able to choose at all is what I'd really prefer) I'd choose the multiple desktops.

Re:Expose!

[Anonymous Coward]

Expose yourself, buddy. The friendly people at the ISO toiled for years just so we could type Exposé on Slashdot.

(PS Slashdork hackers: fix HTML entities. Thank you).

Re:Expose!

[OmniVector]

so far i've only noticed that toast doesn't work anymore. everything else seems to function fine.

the command+tab task switching isn't any different, and I agree that needs work. i haven't tried lightswitchX so i might give it a try.

Re:Expose!

[squiggleslash]

I didn't say it was undocumented, I said it was underdocumented.

Mac OS X is, in general, an underdocumented OS.

Re:Expose!

[nullard]

Mac OS X is, in general, an underdocumented OS.

That's the truth. I mean, it's bad enough that the dead tree manual is a joke, but there are missing man pages! I have to ssh to my linux box to look up some commands. Apple's own commands are often entirely undocumented and don't respond to --help or -h.

Re:Expose!

[TheNetAvenger]

Speaking of virtual desktops, I've set my Panther up to have multiple users up with different environments: Admin, Web, [myusername], etc. Then have started using the "Fast Login" feature to switch between environments. Sounds like a kludge, I know, but I'm enjoying the multiple Docks optimized for different purposes, multiple desktop paterns and multiple permissions.

I know what you mean, I have used this type of thing on one of my Windows XP machines for quite a while now. It is nice to just flip between the users I have setup.

(Again some may it is as kind of a Kludge of the Fast User Switching that has been in XP, but it is a novel way of working I think).

I am very happy to see Apple is adding Fast User Switching, sometihng that I truly miss from XP when I'm on OSX.

Re:Expose!

[minus_273]

actually, the software that comes with tah ati tv wonder does do that. Was quite impressed when i saw it the other day

Re:Expose!

[gabe]

Having been using this for a fw days now (on my Pismo PowerBook G3 no less) I have to say that it's a highly useful feature. F9 tiles all of the windows, F10 tiles all of the windows in the current app, and F11 (the most useful so far) pulls all of the windows off screen so you can see the desktop. The tiling effects aren't bad on a G3, but I'll bet they're a lot faster on a machine with Quartz Extreme and a G4/G5. (You also lose the nifty cube transform for fast user switching if you don't have Quartz Extreme, the screen turns blue instead)

The other bonus to Panther seems to be that EVERYTHING feels faster. Everything except for the new finder. iCal feels like it's actually usable now.

Panther will definitely be worth the $129.

Re:Expose!

[tyrione]

Regarding Tab Interfaces:

Openstep 4.0 Beta 1 codenamed MECCA which I have a copy and which, to this day, is still more advanced than OS X Panther, in many UI ways, had a Tabbed Shelf Finder that well let's just say, "Don't say never about Tabbed Interfaces at Apple."

If and when it makes sense concepts from MECCA which are being used may have more added as time goes by whilst the old Mac faithful get used to this IV-Drip approach to Mindshare conversion.

Re:Expose!

[Paradise Pete]

I'd choose the multiple desktops.

The fast user switching can be used like that. And you get the added benefit that each desktop is under a different user name, with its own file permissions, making it easier to hide your porn.

Images

[Anonymous Coward]

"They have some nice images available too."

had

Some interesting questions

[Dark Paladin]

1. Since the filesystem is journaled by default, can you turn it off later for a speed increase, or is this part of Panther's necessary tweaks?

2. The searching system - does it maintain some sort of small database in the background to keep things fast, or just start off with a "find" style command?

3. Right now, you can't seem to drag documents onto the Application Icons on the left side to have them open automatically - any chance of that changing?

Otherwise, the OS is looking pretty good. I still spend most of my time in either a development tool or the command line, so I'm not that big into Finder and the like. (A good old ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB] gets me to my ~/Documents/Projects folder quite fast enough).

But I do like the idea of when you select an icon, the entire square around it highlights. I've had too many times I've selected image files, and since OS X makes little thumbnail images of the picture the icon symbol, sometimes it's hard to tell if you've selected it or not (especially if the picture is already composed of dark shades).

And labels - I never used OS 9 before (I'm a Linux2OSX convert), so I never got the big deal. But if they're bright and noticable like that, I can see using them to color code my personal/work/Gameforms.com stuff for quick picking.

The one thing I'm curious to look into is the Xcode development program - from the preview, it looks pretty quick and useful. Think Secret doesn't cover that here, and probably won't, but the Xcode is the #1 thing I'd like to play with.

I'd also like to see the "auto-encrypt your Home directory" talked about. From a security standpoint, I'd like to know just how that works, how much processor power it takes up in the background (hm - explains why we may need a G5, ne?). I have a group of guys at the place I work at who are into Penetration Testing, and they're thinking about going OS X - and this Encrypted Home Directory system might be useful to them. (Especially if you can tell the OS what other directories other than /User/username to encrypt.)

Re:Some interesting questions

[bedheading]

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..

Re:Some interesting questions

[Mikey-San]

Did anyone else snicker at "penetration testing"?

No, I have no class.

Re:Some interesting questions

[TheDredd]

Otherwise, the OS is looking pretty good. I still spend most of my time in either a development tool or the command line, so I'm not that big into Finder and the like. (A good old ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB] gets me to my ~/Documents/Projects folder quite fast enough)

I think a lot of people underestimate the power of the Finder.
For example if you put your projects folder in your Toolbar, it's just one click away.
I have two column views, with all the important links in my toolbar, and it's all I ever need. I have the toolbar set to text only mode to save screen space, and set the finder to never ever open in a new window. Works like a charm

Re:Some interesting questions

[instantkarma1]

>2. The searching system - does it maintain some sort of >small database in the background to keep things fast, or >just start off with a "find" style command?

This probably uses the same mechanism that was used in OS 9 and was still used in OS X for Find By Content....Indexing. While indexing the entire hard drive was a real performance drag, in OS 9 you could schedule it to run when the computer was likely not being used (as is 2am on Sunday morning). In OS X, the Find By Content (FBC) indexing occurred each time you navigated into a directory via the Finder. If no previous index has been created, one was then made. If an index did in fact exist, it merely updated it.

So, to sum...no small database, lots of little indexes everywhere.

Re:Some interesting questions

[DChristensen]

I don't know exactly how the encrypted home directory works, but I *think* it will work by essentially being a loopback device on an encrypted disk image, mounted on Users/username. DiskCopy supports 128-bit AES images natively; they will probably just use your password as the key. I suppose you could store a longer passphrase in the Keychain, but then where do you store the Keychain? Not in your home directory...

With this scheme, you will certainly be able to mount other directories similarly.

My .02 USD.

Re:Some interesting questions

[SmittyTheBold]

As far as databased searching of your comptuer, what you're looking for (as long as you meant in the command line ;) is the one-two punch of 'updatedb' and 'locate' - they're wonderful. For some odd reason, though, they're nto in the default search path. My OS X machine is down at this instant, otherwise I'd dell you where they are. Rest assured, though, they're installed with Jaguar.

Re:Some interesting questions

[BitGeek]

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" ... but its not painful, just a little noticable.

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.

Re:Some interesting questions

[Sigh Phi]

Regarding this one point:

I still spend most of my time in either a development tool or the command line, so I'm not that big into Finder and the like. (A good old ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB] gets me to my ~/Documents/Projects folder quite fast enough).

The Finder has tab-completion as well. Hold command-shift-G to get the "Go to Folder..." dialog box (in the Go menu). Then press ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB]. It will expand to ~/Documents/Projects (and it's not particular about capitalization).

Re:Some interesting questions

[Anonymous Coward]

1. You can disable Journaling by using Disk Utility (located in /Applications/Utilities). Click on a volume, click on the "Options" menu, choose "Disable Journaling" or press CMD+J. You can also enable journaling here for drives that aren't yet. The command line alternative is "sudo diskutil enablejournal volume".

2. "Get Info" (CMD+I) on a volume mounted on your desktop. In the get Info window there is a section for 'Content Index' and buttons to index the drive or delete the index. This makes one suspect that the searching does use some sort of database.

3. Drag and Drop safari to the sidebar. Drag and drop a .png file onto the safari icon in the sidebar. .png file is loaded in safari.

I believe applications will only open files they are associated with. Droping a .psd onto text edit does nothing where as dropping the same file on photoshop will open it.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[nattt]

Copy and paste works great. I've been using this forever with OS X.

Panther doesn't run on G5's

[klyX]

have word from apple that the reason G5's aren't being rolled out yet is that Panther won't run on them. The machines are ready to go but there's no OS to run on them.

The version of OSX that will ship with the G5's is 10.2.7, which has backwards hacks of 10.3 stuff like expose ... which is an incredible trick btw.

Re:Panther doesn't run on G5's

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes panther will run on the G5s, it is a 64 bit OS. 10.2.7 will SHIP with the G5s because the G5s come out before panther does, and no 10.2.7 does not include expose, it is jaguar, but with some 64bitnesses - the OS is not 64 bit code, but it will happily launch 64 bit binaries.

Bob

Re:Panther doesn't run on G5's

[MrMickS]

The version of OSX that will ship with the G5's is 10.2.7, which has backwards hacks of 10.3 stuff like expose ... which is an incredible trick btw.

This gets my vote for funny. Apple won't ship any new features with 10.2.7, least of all Expose, but will save them for Panther when they can charge for it.

Re:Panther doesn't run on G5's

[Anonymous Coward]

I call troll...

1) There is no reason at all to believe that 10.2.x would run on the G5's and 10.3 would not.

2) 10.2.7 will include some hacks of 10.3? Huh? Why would APple waste time on adding those to 10.2.x if they did not have 10.3 working on the G5?

3) 10.2.7, from all accounts, is mainly going to be an update to Jaguar allowing it to run on 64 bit computers.

4) From all accounts, recompiling the OS to run on 64 bit will require little more than some tweaks and recompiling. In other words - if they have 10.3 running on G4's, it will take little effort to make it run on G5's. [Note I said "run". Takng full advantage of 64 bit is something else entirely, and will take a couple of years]

5) That makes no sense. You are a troll. And I cannot believe I am responding to you. But you did get moderated up, so...

6) BIGGEST POINT: Who cares if Panther would not run on them. Apple obviously has 10.2.7 running on them. People will buy the machines now knowing they can upgrade later. You contradict yourself. You say Apple has no OS for them, but then go on to talk about 10.2.7 (which has to run somewhat well for Apple to get all of the speed tests done to run the demo)

Re:Panther doesn't run on G5's

[godawful]

well this bodes well for mac users. in the stevenote the gui looked to be very responsive to the hardware steve was using. (pdf renderings, user switching, etc etc) now if you're telling me that wasn't a g5 steve was using, well i can expect a decent speed improvement on my lowly g4 450..
and thats good

No wonder...

[dereklam]

I was surfing around MacRumors and ThinkSecret today, and I hit the ThinkSecret article. The article didn't come up, and I thought ThinkSecret was down.

Now I know the real reason...

LOL

[2nd Post!]

In case you didn't realize it, the Finder is supposed to be the computer, in a user-centric model.

So the physical device the Finder emulates... is your computer :)

Re:LOL

[toddestan]

And we all know those lovely Macs are made out of translucent, multi-colored, brushed metal - don't we?

Re:LOL

[BitGeek]

Plastic is so... 1998.

Now that every $0.20 chotke from a china plastics factory has the "iMac look", Apple has wisely moved on.

Re:LOL

[Thuktun]

In case you didn't realize it, the Finder is supposed to be the computer, in a user-centric model. So the physical device the Finder emulates... is your computer :)

So why not indicate that through a more appropriate name than "Finder".

How about, say, "My Computer"...

(ducks and runs)

Re:LOL

[nougatmachine]

(rolls eyes)

I'm sure everyone will understand that insanely abstract metaphor. iTunes emulates a jukebox. The Finder emulates a computer? You are really reaching, IMHO.
---

Re:/.ed already

[Draoi]

wonderful OSX

Well, according to NetCraft, their server is running FreeBSD. Go figure ...

XCode Screencaps

[evil carrot]

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.

Re:XCode Screencaps

[Hes Nikke]

ahhh!!!! 1/3 of those shots (the ones taken by me) are hosted on my panther box!!! don't /. it!!!!!

My unanswered questions.

[A moron]

I haven't found the answer to these questions regarding panther:

I've seen no mention of specifics related to VPN support in Panther. Apple claims IPSec support. However, 10.2 has IPSec support, just no front-end. Is there a front-end for establishing an IPSec tunnel in Panther? It sounds like maybe this is integrated into the Internet Connect app?

Jobs touted updates to Mail.app but didn't mention whether you can actually do a more advanced search. The current search functionality stinks in comparison to other email clients which allow you to give any number of criteria. Has the search in Mail been improved?

Is X11 still a stand alone application in Panther or is more integrated with the OS?

The Apple Panther page says "support for popular Linux APIs". Any indication of what this means?

Is NetInfo still used as the centralized database for all OS resources or have they finally replaced it with LDAP?

Re:My unanswered questions.

[bedheading]

X11 is still a stand-alone application located in the utilities directory, and it is not installed by default- you have to manually choose the package when customizing your install.

Re:My unanswered questions.

[austad]

Yes, there is a frontend, and the GUI for PPTP and IPSec both support SecurID. However, it appears that NAT-T is *not* supported.

Don't know about the search in Mail.app. But the threading support is half-baked. It only groups based on subject, so all those emails you have with a subject of "RE: hey" get grouped together, whether they are part of the same conversation or not.

X11 is still as standalone as it was before. It would be nice if it started automatically if it detected a program trying to use X.

Re:My unanswered questions.

[Halo1]

However, 10.2 has IPSec support, just no front-end.

If you have a look at the lower right part of this page (the "Works Well with Windows" part), you get your answerw: yes, it's included in Internet Connect and they've also added support for RSA's SecureID-based vpn's/

Is X11 still a stand alone application in Panther or is more integrated with the OS?

I've read or heard somewhere you'll be able to simply double-clock X11 apps to launch them, but I don't remember where anymore (so take this with a grain of salt).

The Apple Panther page says "support for popular Linux APIs". Any indication of what this means?

They will include more programs and libraries which are standard in most Linux distributions so porting of apps and users will be easier.

Is NetInfo still used as the centralized database for all OS resources or have they finally replaced it with LDAP?

I don't have the slightest idea, but I don't see any reason why they would do that (except if they didn't know what else to do and wanted some extra work).

Re:My unanswered questions.

[SlamMan]

IPSec has a nice pretty front end in the Internet Connect. Its in the same spot the old VPN connection stuff was.

X11 is still a stand alone app.

Don't know the rest.

Re:Now with nice images!

[The Infamous Grimace]

No, they're talking to _Mac_ users. How many times must we go over this? 'Mac' is short for 'Macintosh', MAC is short for, well, numerous things.

(tig)
"We do not inherit the land from our ancestors"
"We borrow it from our children"

I don't think it works that way.

[MarcQuadra]

I don't think it really works that way, but running two instances of any PPC OS should be easy with Mac-On-Linux. MOL is like VMWare for the PPC, you can open a full-speed non-emulated Classic session INSIDE Linux, you can also boot it to OSX. I'm pretty sure you could boot multiple sessions as well. With XFree you could even use a mac running linux as a multi-client Mac OS terminal server.

So what you're asking is already possible with 32-bit PPC systems.

Directory encryption already availiable

[SuperKendall]

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...

Re:Directory encryption already availiable

[Dark Paladin]

Cool - I'll check out that tip. Thank you.

OK, so you've got a new Finder...

[hrbrmstr]

As the rest of the song goes "that don't impress me much".

I'm a recent "switchbacker" (used Mac from Plus to early PowerMac's and just got a dual G4). Since it's a ".#" release, I wasn't expecting a ton of major changes (since that should be a "#." release). However, this is the second review I've seen that spends the majority of it's time on the Finder. Wow. A new Finder.

I know things are different in Mac land (one reason I switched back), but not being an insider or able to attend the conference (hence, no preview copy), I'd really love to start seeing more authoritative articles on what kinds of 64-bit goodness is there for the G5's or a thorough coverage of what cool parts of FreeBSD 5 made it into Darwin/X.

Granted, it's a different perspective (I'm perfectly happy cd'ing and ls'ing from a terminal). Perhaps most Mac folks will be cheering a decent upgrade to their main view of the system.

I can't help thinking, tho, that alot of Mac /.'ers will want the inside skinny as opposed to hearing that the Finder can't be skinned (tho that's a fun complaint since I'd rather not stare at brushed metal all the time either).

Re:OK, so you've got a new Finder...

[b1t r0t]

And I might mention that Windows 2000 is actually NT 5.0, while XP is NT 5.1. It's only a ".#" release and Microsoft is charging money for it? Heresy!

Re:OK, so you've got a new Finder...

[godawful]

we will just have to wait for an Ars Technica review.. notoriously in-depth

Re:OK, so you've got a new Finder...

[fafaforza]

Yeah, it would be interesting to know if ipfw has a logging facility, stateful connection tracking, pipes, or, really, anything more than allow/deny.

Re:OK, so you've got a new Finder...

[coolmacdude]

Think Secret says this is the first of many articles that wil focus on all aspects of the OS.

Re:OK, so you've got a new Finder...

[hrbrmstr]

very true. ars does a great job with most anything they decide to tackle as a subject for an article. one more thing to keep monitoring before panther is in the hands of us mere mortals.

Re:OK, so you've got a new Finder...

[hrbrmstr]

i'm not complaining about purchasing a new release (i'll gladly pay an Apple Tax over a M$ Tax any day). i'm merely pointing out that since it's a ".#" release, there shouldn't technically be that much extra in it, or at least we shouldn't expect there to be.

while XP is better than 2K, it qualifies as a ".#" release. more eye candy, some compatability libs and various tweaks here and there. no astounding innovation.

Re:Now with nice images!

[Mikey-San]

Pretty pictures are better than white, monospaced error text on a big blue background. ;-)

This is the kind of feature that we want to see...

[WIAKywbfatw]

I've not seen it in action, but Expose strikes me as being the kind of feature that we want to see in our operating systems and applications - like most real software innovations, it's quick, simple and does something useful.

Features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, show desktop, context-sensitive help, tooltips, etc don't add to what you can acheive with your software but they do add to the richness of your user-experience by making software more flexible and user-friendly.

Very few computing tasks are truly intuitive - if you want proof of this, try putting a novice in front of a PC and watch them struggle with even the most basic concepts - but adding nice touches like this really do help users feel more at ease with their computers and more productive in the long run.

It's not earth-shattering stuff but it's stuff like this that's made today's software so much more accessible to the masses than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.

The new finder already exists!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its called 'ls, cd rm, cp, chmod, and mv'!

Re:Now with nice images!

[byolinux]

Also, remember that *Apple* is the company, Mac is the product. Mac don't make Apple's and Apple Mac don't make them either! ;)

It pains me to think of the number of times I've had to explain that, even to sales droids...

1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[zensmile]

I have been using Panther for a week and have found many good improvements.

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... ;-P Just being silly.

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.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[mccalli]

The fax feature did not integrate well with the address book.

Interesting - could you elaborate on that please? Being a new user coming over from XP I'm missing fax and user switching at the moment and looking forward to getting them back.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[drinkypoo]

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.

That's great. Windows XP's Fax Service doesn't do this, which I found to be really annoying. There's no reason whatsoever that they can't do networked faxing, except that Microsoft just didn't implement it. (Once you have the fax stuff done once, it's relatively little code.)

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[cnkeller]

1. Piles. I know they seem trivial. But I would like it.

It's called Expose. I know, I know, you were hoping for the other implementation of piles....yeah, we all were.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[tgd]

One question...

Does the user-switching work when the screensaver has the screen locked? Ie, if I lock my screen and my girlfriend wants to log in, can she?

Not much use if I have to leave the computer unlocked all the time anyway!

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[robbieduncan]

The eject menu extra in in Jaguar. It's just that there is no GUI to turn it on. It's in a folder in /Library or /System/Library (can't remember which). Or just search for .menuextra (iirc - I'm on a Windows box at work)

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[zensmile]

It worked...but there seemed to be a big. I wasn't able to grab a name from the address book and have it fill in the correct info. Your own mileage may vary. It is going to be the best tool when it is refined and released. Trust me. It just rocks. I really think that it was a bug when I wasn't able to get the fax number to populate. I was able to just type the fax number in the "Send to" (or whatever) box and it dialed and sent the fax.

This will hopefully (probably) be refined when the OS ships.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[b1t r0t]

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.

I understand that fax receive is supported? Now if only there was a way to leave a getty process running that would detect a modem login vs an incoming fax, and especially if it could do a PPP session, then I'd have one more reason to ditch Linux.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[overunderunderdone]

2. Themes. I really like the idea of customizing my OS and maybe tone down Aqua a bit.

Waaay back when OS X was under development and hadn't shipped yet I read a blurb about themes on one of the reasonably reliable (haha) rumor sites. It seems that themes was something they were actually planning on but Steve played with Kalieadescope (themes for OS 9) to try the idea out and *hated* it with a passion. He thought 99.9% of the themes were amateurish, ugly and big steps backwards in terms of usability and the remaining .1% weren't anything to write home about either.

Usually I don't give much credence to rumor sites, especially when their claiming to know what specific people did and though... BUT this anecdote aligns so perfectly with everything we know about Jobs, his personality and his values, that it seems very likely something like this IS what happened to the theme support which was known to be in development way back then.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[hobbit]

What are you talking about? Piles and Expose are completely different. One is a collection of documents (like a folder), the other works on windows.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[godawful]

There are a few options right there, i frankly only find it troublesome to have multiple docks. but the option for such is always good.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[JohnsonWax]

3. Multiple docks. One for office apps. One for games. One for graphical/web apps. And in the darkness bind them... ;-P Just being silly.

Actually, that's what fast user switching is for. Create another account for your games and you get another dock.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[Wesley Felter]

Mac OS 8.5 even had themes (aka the Appearance Manager) and Apple developed serveral themes in-house but never shipped them. My favorite was Drawing Board that made all the widgets look kinda like a blueprint.

Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER

[Phroggy]

Well, you can switch back to the login screen without actually logging out. So then your girlfriend could log in, and your stuff would keep going, and you'd need a password to log back in to your environment.

How, if switching users (or getting back to the login screen) is done from a menu, and the menu is inaccessible while the password-protected screen saver is on?

Is there a "switch user" button on the screen saver's password dialog? That would make sense.

Aren't they?

[2nd Post!]

My PowerBook is a lovely titanium grey, my PowerMac is a similar silvery shade of Quicksilver, as are the Aluminum PowerBooks and aluminum G5. Heh, even the iSight.

Oh, you mean the eMac, iBook, iPod, and iMac?

Well, hrm, I guess the Finder is supposed to be 'pro' and not 'consumer'? I dunno, I guess the analogy has to break somewhere, and I guess it's with the consumer level hardware.

Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder?

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

The new Finder layout is also present in open/save dialog boxes, providing a consistent interface throughout the system.

I *really* want to see a screenshot of this! (would y'all please stop /.ing the article? :) One pet peeve I've had with Macs is the disparity between the Finder and the open/save dialogs you get from regular software. Course this problem exists on Windows and Linux too, but the Mac finder is much nicer, and so the disparity is more pungent on a Mac.

I've just had too many stints where a newbie saves a file (using a save dialog) and then can't find it. Because the finder looks different. Heck, I've used these things for 20 years and I sometimes lose files myself (must be getting senile).

I REALLY want better integration with open/save dialogs so my mother can find any file she happens to save!

Re:Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder?

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

Just look at the GTK file dialog for inspiration....

Not sure which dialog you're talking about (Mozilla, and the GIMP have slightly different dialogs), but I'm not interested in something that only shows a list (or array a la Windows dialog) of a single directory's files...even if it does have pretty icon colors :) An additional list containing directories doesn't cut it.

Ideally, I'd like the open/save dialog to be sort of a 'mini-Finder'. Make it a brushed-metal window that has the same toolbar and same view of files (eg can be icons, lists, or columns). Basically the dialog should have the same L&F as the finder. It would also be nice to indicate to the user that the default directory to save/open is the same as the desktop, but I'm not sure how that would best be done.

Bottom line, directories confuse the hell out of new users. And so does having two different views of your Desktop. Apple is good at not confusing the hell out of new users...if anyone scratches my itch, it will be them.

Re:Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder?

[_xeno_]

The Windows save dialog is a mini-Explorer. It has the Windows Explorer embedded right in it. It supports everything Explorer does, which can be annoying at times. (For example, you can move and copy files from within the save/open dialog. You can also rename existing files and create new directories. Renaming and new directories is useful. Accidently moving something in the dialog is annoying because it doesn't get added to the Explorer "Undo" list. Of course, I hate Explorer's Undo anyway, because they don't have a corresponding "Redo" and it doesn't always Undo what you expect it to, sometimes instead Undoing something you did hours before because the operation you accidently did isn't undoable. Enough of this rant.)

The Windows dialog does keep you to two view options, though - you're only allowed "List" and "Detailed" views. So it's not quite what you want, but it's hardly new. Windows has done this since Windows 95.

Re:Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder?

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

You're right re: Windows file dialog features. It still differs from the desktop or explorer windows in L&F (well, in L at least :)

Maybe the best thing to do is to plot a small-scale image of your desktop in your save dialog as background, at least when it is showing your Desktop directory. And for any other directory use whatever bg you've configured for that dir. Should be easy for Apple.

Re:Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder?

[JonathanBoyd]

Try http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/finder.html - there are plenty of nice screenshots on Apple's website.

Re:Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Interesting... looking at the screenshot it appears that the left-column save dialog looks surprisingly similar to the dialogs in Windows XP.

Re:Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder?

[Alaska Jack]

It's always seemed to me that using special open/save dialog boxes was redundant. I mean, what you are doing is trying to locate a specific file or location within the filesystem, right? But there is already a mechanism for doing this -- it's called the finder. What about a system like this: You're using a word processing progam. You select "Open." Immediately whatever open documents you are working on are minimized, and a small floating box appears in the corner of the screen. It says, "Please locate the file you would like to open." Perhaps there are buttons to open your docs folder, or the last folder used by that application. And there would be a "Show files of type:" drop-down menu. But otherwise, you would just use the finder to navigate to the file. I think this would also work for saving. The floating box would have such things as a drop-down list for "Save As", but again, you would just navigate to wherever you wanted to save the file using the finder itself. - Alaska Jack

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[alien666]

XShelf allows one to break a move or copy in two steps by giving you a temporary holding pallete to which you can drag an icon or group of icons; but as others have mentioned, the copy/paste "hack" works, too.

Piles?

[rleyton]

What happened to the "piles" document management system that was mentioned previously?

Anybody know? I was looking forward to hearing more about this, but fear it's fallen by the wayside...

Re:Piles?

[drinkypoo]

It got reamed.

Re:Piles?

[Ballresin]

I believe Piles was used in a different way than most people had thought it would be. I believe you will see the "Piles" effect when using Expose and you will see what I mean. Expose perfectly matches the patent description of Piles, and that's why I draw that conclusion. You will probably never see a "Pile" of folders on the desktop. However, if you have multiple folder windows open, Expose works quite nicely.

Re:Piles?

[phillymjs]

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

Re:Piles?

[wirelessbuzzers]

See, I know they say that these are the same, but the "piles" feature in the patent is like a folder, which pops up its items (with a fancy iCandy effect) when moused over or something. This would be really handy for .tex, .aux, .log, .dvi, .ps, .pdf combinations that seem to be in an awful lot of folders for me...

Re:Piles?

[wavedeform]

There was another rumored feature of Panther called Smart Folders. This was supposed to be much like Smart Playlists in iTunes. The "Smart Folders" feature probably does a lot of what piles was supposed to do. From reading the original paper on Piles, I gather that it does two things:
1 - manage a selection based on some criteria
2 - display the selection in a new manner

If I understand what Smart Folders is supposed to do, it accomplishes the first of these things. My question now is whether Smart Folders is going to make it into Panther.

Saddening

[wackoman2112]

It saddens me to see such so much anti-Apple sentiment in this discussion. I am mainly a PC user, and I probably will always be a PC user, for reasons I won't bring up here, but I've used Apples before and they aren't bad computers. For example, the video and multimedia capabilities on MacOS can be matched nowhere else. And my short encounters with MacOS X have been very enjoyable.

So take this anti-appleism elsewhere. You're ruining the experience for others.

Re:Saddening

[bpbond]

Why did the parent comment get modded insightful?? What's insightful about it? And where exactly is the rampant anti-Apple sentiment in these comments? Good lord, most of them just consist of people asking about, and drooling over, Panther.

What the new finder means to you (potentially)

[Brat Food]

Ill paste in my letter to macintouch:

Potential connection between the advanced file system developed at Be Inc. (BFS) and Apple's new Finder for Panther:
Reference these two URLs for some background:
Tales of a BeOS Refugee
Windows on a Database - Sliced and Diced by BeOS Gurus
I think, in terms of the new Finder, it's time for a paradigm shift. First, note that Apple hired the guys mentioned in the articles above. Second, realize that the demo of "live" searches is most certainly because of the efforts of the BFS people. Third, realize that you could, in theory, never have to look thru another folder again. If you take some of the ideas the BFS people had, everything would be context-based. Having a database back-end to your Finder, with unlimited "meta data" (actually, the start of this, I beleive, was shown, in the form of labels), could provide, as one of the engineers put it, a kind of "google" interface to your data. Just some things to chew on while we watch the new Finder evolve.

Re:What the new finder means to you (potentially)

[Jeffrey Baker]

Nice work. I saw your letter on macintouch too. But I was wondering, do you have information that leads you to believe that the new finder features in Mac OS X are in any way related to BFS? Or are you just trying to draw a comparison?

Re:What the new finder means to you (potentially)

[Brat Food]

I think they are directly corilated. Its not easy, if not impossible to do live filtering/searching like that w/o some kind of new backend. And since apple hired one or both of the guys form the article...

Then lables. There is NO metadata in osx files. In old mac os, every file had a good chunk of metadata attached (type, creator, invisibility among other flags, and no doubt lables was another one. In a beos type file system, you can suport any number of different types of metadata, from ID3 type stuff, email information(the classic beOS emails-are-files), or in this case, lables.

I think the transition will be gradual, since adopting something of this nature gung-ho could be disasterous (not everyone on the new FS, and losing the metadata on transfer). I would also something like this might eventually get rolled in to opensource. If it does, and its what id expect it to be, i imagine the adoption rate will be very fast.

Theres no definite evidence, but this FS transition was speculated year(s) ago when apple hired these guy(s), and wouldnt expect anything but "really great stuff"

Brushed Metal Determining Factor

[st. jude]

And these days it seems that brushed metal is being used for any app that doesn't generate documents. So Finder is brushed metal; iTunes/iPhoto/iMovie, which are for managing content, not creating it, are brushed metal; TextEdit and Mail are Aqua. Apple hasn't said this, but it seems to be part of the equation. We'll see what happens when the Office-killer update to AppleWorks comes out...

First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

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.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[Pantheraleo2k3]

You're running Panther on that? What are the specs? How fast/usable is it? Did you run any benchmarks?

Sorry about the hyperactivity, but I want an iBook and want to know about the performance

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[JonathanBoyd]

Good to hear we don't need Quartz Extreme for Exposé - I'm stuck on an iBook 500 with 8MB Rage Mobility. Does the user switching work okay? With the funky spinning screen? Does the Finder remember your view preferences now? Always forgets whether I'm using list, column or icon view for each folder. I usually use column , but it seems to want icon most of the time or list, so this is my pet peeve.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[Squidgee]

If you get a new iBook, OS X flies. Just sos ya know.. :D

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[Jeremy Erwin]

He did say it was "snappier". As the owner of a dual-USB iBook, I can say that I'm relieved by that statement.

As a caveat, let me point out that dual-USB iBooks used 8 MB Rage 128Pro (read "obsolete") graphics . As that openGL implementation is only able to handle texture objects with dimensions of size 2^n, early iBooks cannot run QuartzExtreme. Nor can we use fancy T&L acceleration nor even (sniff) shaders.

Though the current iBooks are equipped with ATI Radeon 7500 chipsets, and thus can use Quartz Extreme, shaders are not (IIRC) supported. This omission may not seem all that important now, but in later versions of OS-X, Apple might see fit to leverage shaders for another "Oh my fucking god. I need to buy 10.4" type moment.

The iBooks haven't been updated for quite a while, only support Airport (not Airport Extreme), can't use Altivec, are are generally getting a bit long in the tooth. If I had money burning a hole in pocket, I'd wait to see if Apple comes out with anything new in the next two or three months, or go with a 12 inch Powerbook G4.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[sulli]

* Mail.app has been made a little bit prettier, and a little bit more functional.

Less slow? Mail is the thing I hate most about OS X on my old PB G3 Bronze (yes, I know, OLD) because it's so damn slow. Also because it doesn't respond to normal keyboard behavior (e.g. Home, Cmd-Up, ????). Fix that and I'll be happy.

BTW: The new Mozilla 1.4 is almost as fast as Safari, and more functional.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

My iBook is 600MHz, 386MB, Combo Drive, 8MB Rage (I cry myself to sleep every night out of pity for myself, having bought the last iBook model w/ this vid chipset), ...

I haven't really stress tested Panther yet. The general feeling of it, though, is just a bit more responsive.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

The preview that I have seems to still have borky view preferences saving in the Finder. I'm sure it'll get cleared up by the time Panther goes gold. User switching seems cool. I'm the only user of my iBook, so I don't have much experience with it. Oh yeah - something I forgot about. The new cmd-tab interface is freaking elite. It looks super-slick, and it's very fast.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

Mail.app seems fast enough for me. What operations were so slow for you?

In Mail.app (in Panther), if you click on a message in the mailbox, it then appears in the preview pane below. If you then hit pgup/pgdown/end/home, it scrolls the message in the preview pane. Is this the behavior you expect, or are you expecting something different?

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

Oh.. another note. Organizing by thread in Mail.app is k-rad. I've missed that since I stopped using Mutt for Mail.app.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

Oh yeah.. As far as Exposé goes, it's the tiniest bit sluggish - but it's totally usable. You'll love it.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

Oh yeah.. another note. I've talked to a few other Mac users, who haven't noticed the change - but it's one of the first things I saw when I booted up. The font used for the system menus and everything seems subtley changed. It's a tiny, tiny change - but I like it. It just looks a little cleaner. Maybe I'm just completely insane, and it's all in my head. I dunno..

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[sulli]

Scroling through messages in the inbox. I don't use preview pane, but I often want to skip to (beginning - next new - end) and there don't seem to be any keyboard shortcuts for it. In Outlook Express 4.5 for OS 9 (the last good version), Cmd-Up took you to the beginning, Cmd-Down to the end.

The other thing I hate is the constant mailbox cleaning-up that halts all other work in Mail. OK, I have around 4000 messages in my inbox, but any mail program built since 1998 should be designed for that number of messages.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[JonathanBoyd]

Well, I don't often have someone else using my iBook either, but nice to be able to show the feature off every once in a while :^) What's so super-slick about the mew cmd-tab interface?

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

See for yourself! It's not different than any other alt-tabbing - it just looks nice and slick :)

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[DataSquid]

Yay, now I can ask my stupid question about this :) Does it support most of the features of Liteswitch X? ie. can I tag multiple programs for Quitting, and have them quit all at once when I release? Can I hide apps from it?

In short: Is it like Liteswitch X but without the annoying nag screen? :)

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[mog]

Hmm.. not as far as I can tell. Like I said, it's just a cmd-tab task switching utility.

Re:First thoughts on Panther

[Elwood P Dowd]

In Jaguar's Mail.app, pageup/pagedown/end/home all get borked about 50% of the time for me. I have no idea why, but it's fricken annoying.

Dunno what he's talking about with the too slow comment, though. Even with the nav keys busted, it's my favorite mail client ever.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[ennerseed]

read: "CUT and paste". No, it is not in Jag. Cut and Paste would allow for moving of files not copying. Having to copy your file in one location, then navigate to where you want it, duplicate your file, then navigate (or press the back button xx Times) back to the original location/file, and delete the original file is just plain stupid.
You should be able to simply call "cut", by contextual menu or command x. After doing so the file should stay in its location. When the new location is found, you should be able to paste and the file should simply change is directory location.
Using "Cut" in this way, the file would never be deleted, unlike cut in most other parts of the OS where you see your item, picture, whatever being deleted or erased and invisibly copied to the clipboard. Which can then be erased entirely from the computer when another item is copied to the clipboard. Not to mention it's not being copied ever so the amount of time is notta.

Re:What the hell are you talking about?

[eparkin]

I'm CTO/Chief Software Architect for a financial company and we have been moving our development team over to mac laptops over the past year or so. The upcoming Dual G5 looks to be a possible replacement for our Dual 2.0Ghz Xeon Linux server. Given that the price of the aforementioned Xeon server, the G5 is a much better deal overall.
I couldn't see using it as a personal computer in our company though, I will definitely give you that, considering most of our work is done via ssh onto the server(s). Our main reason for using the Macs are that simply disappear in terms of the technology and let you work. I won't go into the evangelical thing now as I'm sure everyone has heard it from one time or another from Mac users. (though on Intel architecture, I'm a BSD junkie).

egp
http://codearchitect.net

dock

[austad]

When are they going to make the dock useful like the windowmaker dock? It has some neat visual effects, but all it really does is act like a half-assed task bar right now.

Re:dock

[wavedeform]

Agreed. I really don't care for the Dock. It always seems to get in the way. (and to rebut the AC, I've been using the Mac since March 1984)

What I'd really like to see Apple do is document all the Dock APIs and allow it to be replaced with third party alternatives. For example the program DragThing performs much better than the Dock in many ways. There are better Command-Tab style application switchers, such as KeyboardMaestro. These great third party alternatives cannot truly replace the Dock until more of the workings of the Dock are documented.

There's one more stumbling block: Apple has been migrating more functionality into the Dock (for reasons that are unclear to me). For example, with Jaguar, the Dock owns the Desktop. It's responsible for painting the background image, and handling clicks on the Desktop. Pre-Jaguar this was handled by the Finder. This means that much more than Dock functionality is lost if the Dock is disabled.

Brushed metal and laptops

[mccalli]

I'm a fairly recent Powerbook owner (~1 month), and one thing I've noticed since using Safari is that brushed metal can be quite unreadable on a laptop screen.

Specifically, unless your screen is fairly far forward, you can't read the metal tab title names in Safari. Those titles are just the system font on top of the metal look, so this hassle is not limited to Safari.

Given that, I think this brushed metal is an odd direction to be moving in for a company proclaiming this their year of the laptop.

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[MoneyT]

You might want to try calibrating the color on your laptop. The tab names are quite readable on my powerbook.

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[MyDixieWrecked]

Yeah, but the only tabs that are hard to read are the ones that are recessed.

I've had my 15", 1ghz powerbook since december and lately, more and more apple applications are harder to see on the screen unless I tilt it forward, but other things look better when it's tilted back a little. i dunno. I like the brushed metal, but it's not for everything. I think the finder was much better when it was aqua-styled.

I just hope that apple's head doesn't fall off for 10.4. They have a habbit of having really great ideas and improving on them until they are almost perfect, then ruining them by over-perfecting. I think that's why they went with the total overhaul for OSX, by the time 8.6 rolled around, the whole interface was going to the dogs (control strip, tabbed folders, menu-craziness, ahhhhh!).

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[ChuyMatt]

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).

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[mccalli]

You may want to get your eyes tested....

My wife is an optician... :-)

Cheers,
Ian

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[jtrascap]

It's no prob on my 2001 iBook - Either you color calibration is off or you've got font smoothing set wrong. Go to Preferences > Appearance and set your Font Smoothing to Medium - best for LCDs. You could alos have a corrupted font, but in any event it's not a problem here...

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[newkid]

Have you tried putting a pillow on your chair? It works for me!

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[Pope]

by the time 8.6 rolled around, the whole interface was going to the dogs (control strip, tabbed folders, menu-craziness, ahhhhh!)

Those were all evolved features, and quite nice. Except for "menu-craziness" which I don't understand what you're meaning.

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[MyDixieWrecked]

The control strip was a good idea at first, at a time when you needed to change color depth and monitor resolution frequently (ie- something didn't autochange or change back when you were done), and before external speakers came into wide use (now, you just turn the knob down on the speakers and never touch the volume control).

I never needed to turn filesharing or appletalk on and off enough to warrant those controls, I just left them on all the time.

the CD control thing was kinda lame, although handy for when I didn't wanna launch the CD player app, and the other things were more or less useless to myself, although I have seen some 3rd party modules which made good use of it. Usually when I did a fresh installation, I'd either turn the strip off completely, or delete all but 2 or 3 modules from it. It's crazy that it goes nearly all the way across the screen on a clamshell iBook running 9.2.

the tabbed folders was nice and I didn't really use them a lot until I got used to the dock in OSX and start bar in (ack!) windows, but I wish you could have stuck them on the left and right sides of the screen rather than just the bottom.

As to menu craziness, I'm referring to the packed apple menu (which wasn't bad at all until about 8.1 or so, I don't remember), the expandable application menu (so you can see the app's name in the menu bar), and when you start installing a lot of 3rd party software you get a lot of CMMs so your contextual menus get cluttered.

Also, towards the end of the classic MacOS, the control panels folder got bloated to a point where I found myself deleting the alias int he apple menu and only aliasing the main 5-10 control panels that I used into their own folder in the Apple menu.

as you go from MacOS 7.6 to 9.x, the whole GUI begins to get more of a sense of clutteredness. It gets more and more cumbersome to navigate, and there were a lot of features to fix that (ie springloaded folders), but everything began to get jumbled. OSX was a godsend in that respect, although I still see a lot of work that needs to be done in many areas. Namely GUI snapiness and they need to re-populate the context menus. There is a serious dearth of choices in the Finder when one "right clicks."

Apple seriously needs to go back to their minimalist roots. I mean, they're doing it with the hardware's design, why not the software's? ...and why aren't they touting speed improvements in 10.3? Did I miss it? I swear they said there was gonna be another jump in app/system start times, GUI responsiveness and whatever else there is to speed up for the next major release after panther. I want OSX to feel like OS9 on my ghz Ti!!!!

Maybe the G5s will feel like that?

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[b-baggins]

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.

Re:Brushed metal and laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

On my iBook I can read it just fine, I clearly see:

Panty Analysis Getting Underwear at the top of this window!

faxing for $129??

[mblase]

The fax sharing and abilities are worth the price of the upgrade.

Well heck, if that's all people want, they may as well save $100 and buy Page Sender instead, which offers a few more features besides. Got it, use it, love it.

Re:I love the Places sidebar! - the Shelf!

[blakespot]

NeXTSTEP had a SHELF up in the Workspace Manager (Finer here) window's top bar where you park files in the meantime. How about bringing that back for OS X?

blakespot

Reads NTFS formatted drives

[Alcimedes]

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.

Because, As We All Know...

[Greyfox]

The real world device metaphor always works well.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[sebi]

The real world device metaphor always works well.

I suppose you are referring to the article about QuickTime 4. When was that released? Three years ago? Four? Everyone agrees that this interface was a disaster, but Apple has come a long way since then. And you have to admit that they tried something new back then. You learn more from a failure.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[Mikey-San]

Give me a break. I love OS X as much as the next guy, but QuickTime Player hasn't gotten better.

The volume control is a slider again, but the player's UI still eats ass.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[jeffehobbs]

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

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[sebi]

Give me a break. I love OS X as much as the next guy, but QuickTime Player hasn't gotten better.

The volume control is a slider again, but the player's UI still eats ass.

Really? I'm not sure I agree. Play/Pause? Check. Fast forward and reverse? Check. First and last frame? Check? Volume Fader? Check. Everything you typically need from a media player is easily accessible. It works and the pro features for combine/split files are pretty intuitive. Performance with certain file types (AVI) can be bad, but I don't count that as an UI issue.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[BitGeek]

No, it wasnt' a disaster. Not everyone agrees.

In fact, as someone who's read virtually every UI book I can get my hands on, I'd like to point out that it works as a metaphor. And that's what UIs are supposed to do.

I don't know why people hate brushed metal so much, it doesn't make sense to me.

And you don't hear people going on and on about he garish clash of colors in Windows, or Linux... ugh, the best things in the Linux and Windows LaF (which are pretty similar to begin with) are still worse than the worst things in Apple's LaF.

As far as good consistent UI goes, Apple rules the roost.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[Mikey-San]

I don't need a play button that's NEARLY as big as QT Player's is. Couple that with the size of the other buttons, and you no longer have to wonder why the player window has to remain so friggin' large when you play a small movie.

Intiutive? Clicking the timecode in the window to get to balance, treble, and bass controls is /not/ intuitive at all. If it were consistent, at least, it would reverse itself to time remaining rather than time elapsed.

You can accomplish all of the things you do with 6.2's Player with the embedded QT pane you see in Web browser windows when you load a QT movie or MPEG or whatever. All that's missing are the first and last frame buttons, and I'm sure a little creativity will come up with a way to include them.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[sebi]

I don't need a play button that's NEARLY as big as QT Player's is. Couple that with the size of the other buttons, and you no longer have to wonder why the player window has to remain so friggin' large when you play a small movie.

Now we're getting somewhere. You find the size of the buttons offensive. That doesn't make them bad UI. The most noticeable button is also the most frequently used one. You know--the one mapped to the space-bar. I can't really argue with the fact, that there is a minimum size the player window will have. That means you can't realistically display more than 6 windows at the same time on a 1024x768 screen. I have no idea how many users feel that this is a problem. If we stay as unscientific as humanly possible and take you and me as sample group, then I would guess that it could be about 50%. If the problem is about having the movie playing in the background then I don't see how player size keeps anyone from doing that.

Intiutive? Clicking the timecode in the window to get to balance, treble, and bass controls is /not/ intuitive at all. If it were consistent, at least, it would reverse itself to time remaining rather than time elapsed.

You're right. Clicking on the icon (and even though it is animated, it still is an icon) displaying the sound levels of the movie you are watching should not display the controls for modifying sound properties. What where they thinking?

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[sebi]

In fact, as someone who's read virtually every UI book I can get my hands on, I'd like to point out that it works as a metaphor. And that's what UIs are supposed to do.

It still was a disaster for one simple reason: The volume control. Rotary controls are extremely easy and intuitive to control in real life. But the mouse is not an adequate input device to translate this functionality on screen. You could adjust the volume by click and holding on the little dial and then moving it linearly but immediately broke the metaphor that way. When they switched to the fader input, that is used now, the metaphor was not broken, but the usability was greatly improved. I never claimed that Apple was taking a step in the wrong direction, I just observed that the first iteration of the metal interface was poorly executed.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[yerricde]

You find the size of the buttons offensive. That doesn't make them bad UI.

Apple could at least have made the buttons shrink by half when the size of the window decreases below, say, 320x240 pixels.

Clicking on the [audio level and timecode] icon (and even though it is animated, it still is an icon) displaying the sound levels of the movie you are watching should not display the controls for modifying sound properties.

It should have been implemented as two controls: one that opens the equalizer, and one that switches between time remaining and time elapsed.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[diamondc]

Aqua apps clash with brushed metal apps. simple as that. Either they should stick with everything Aqua or brushed metal. Too bad it's heading towards brushed metal cause in my opinion it's ugly.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[operagost]

Timecode doesn't have anything to do with the sound. It's the current point in the movie expressed in hours, minutes, seconds, and frames.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[MoneyT]

What version of Quicktime are you using? The window I have open in front of me shows the time code on the left, clicking it does nothing.

Clicking on the sound levels on the right however brings up the sound controls.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[the argonaut]

1. Brushed Metal is not nearly as elegant as the aqua interface, especially is you've applied the smooth aqua them that destroys the stupid pinstripes that seem to make everything look blurry. Personally, I would probably not be as opposed to it if they'd get rid of the brushed portion of it, but that's just me.

2. It's being done in a totally half assed way. The whole "some things are brushed metal, somethings are not" reminds me too much of running windows (or most X desktops) where it seems the standard UI is whatever the app developers want to do. When it was just a few apps that made sense (ie, quicktime or itunes) to be brushed, it wasn't that bad. Then they came up with the UI guidelines for what should be brushed, and of course Apple was the first major developer to throw that out the window. Reallt it is getting to the point where Apple's just got to go with one or the other, or give users a choice.

2a. alot of the interface elements just don't look right with the brushed metal. Looking at the finder screenshots sans the places section and the toolbar, the window looks really odd.

3. Brushed Metal (as implemented) wastes a LOT of space. It's quite inefficient.

Personally, I'm not too worried about it, as I figure somebody will have a hack out by the time of Panther's release that will strip the Brushed Metal. Then Apple will break the hack. And then somebody will come out with a new hack...I think you get the idea.

Re:Because, As We All Know...

[hungjury]

Some mistakes are honest ones that you learn from. Others are just plain stupid. QT4 is in the latter category. If Apple had had a functioning Human Interface Group at the time QT4 was developed, or had Tog (www.asktog.com) still been with Apple, a disaster like QT4 (or the hockey puck mouse, or...) would never, ever have seen the light of day. There's just too much known about how humans use devices efficiently to allow such mistakes to happen. These kind of mistakes happen when you put people in charge who care more about things "looking cool" than working right. It's not an area where Apple should get an ounce of slack.

Re:Google cache

[wackoman2112]

ALERT! ALERT!

Don't click above! He specially crafted the URL to go to chofmann's IBM Olympic INFO Application javascript string append tester!!!

Xcode info and discussion..

[henele]

..Can be found in a forum thread here (linked from a MacRumors article)

Piles?

[Surak]

Piles. I know they seem trivial. But I would like it.

Nah. You don't piles. Trust me. I have them. /me looks around for Preparation "H".

Python 2.3 will be included

[shredwheat]

I don't know if it was mentioned in the article (down), but Guido van Rossom just mentioned that apple is planning to update their Python to version 2.3.

It sounds like Apple has begun using Python for more of their core features. For now all we know it will be used for "PDF Generation Workflow".

This is great news as the Python 2.2 included with OSX 10.2 was a bit broken on the OSX platform.

I've never used OSX, but I am impressed that they ship Python with the standard release. I sure wish Windows would do this too, then there really would be a sweet crossplatform development language .

http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/py th on-dev/1690127

Not Violating the HIG

[skti]

Apple has, uh, adjusted the HIG for Panther. Metal can now be used for apps that:

1. Are part of the digital hub
2. Emulate a real world device
3. Use the "playlist paradigm"

Therefore, Panther is #3, as it has the new sidebar.

Re:Not Violating the HIG

[IamTheRealMike]

They changed the HIG again?

How does this document have any credibility left when Apple seem stuck in a cycle of 1) violate our own rules, 2) change them to suit, 3) goto 1

The least you could expect is that after having published these guidelines, they'd try and stick to them. If even their creator doesn't, why should anybody else?

Re:Not Violating the HIG

[bnenning]

Apple seem stuck in a cycle of 1) violate our own rules, 2) change them to suit, 3) goto 1

For once, I agree with you on an Apple topic. There are quite obviously no rules for Apple's use of metal other than "wherever Steve wants it". Silly, and I expect better from them.

The New Un-Aqua

[ihatewinXP]

It seems to me that the 'lickable' version of the Aqua UI was meant as a marketing promo for the new OS. I say that because with every new version (starting with Public Beta --> 10.0) the obtrusive and overly eye candy elements are being steadily removed. Looking at the new finder window theme _almost_ reminds me of Platinum OS9 - clean and simple (aside from the overuse of brushed metal). Not to say that OSX isnt the most beautiful interface ive ever seen or that 10.3 wont continue on that scale, but it does seem that after the initial fanfare the Aqua UI is evolving into what it should have been from 10.0..... Easy on the eyes, unobtrusive, easy to use and absolutely gorgeous to look at.

Re:The New Un-Aqua

[Amiasian]

Oh, yes. I've found what I consider to be my favorite OS X theme in Milk. It's white. It's elegant. It's simple. It reminds me of the iHardware color schemes. Very, very sexy. And, it gets rid of Aqua's most loathed, in my view, feature - Pin Stripes. Anyhow, Milk can be found here. Assuming one has duality, which I believe the site provides a link, it makes for a very attractive UI.

use XShelf...

[Anonymous Coward]

On macupdate.com or versiontracker.com.

mac-mods

[Anonymous Coward]

Geebus Khrist you *pple mods have a, errr, stick up your butts!

Seriously, I think Taco needs to make the whole meta-mod thing maybe topic-specific - so if the mac-heads keep modding everything mac related as troll, then they lose the ability to mod mac-threads.

Note that I'm posting as AC as I have no doubt that this will, in fact, be modded into oblivion by a mac-head.

Serious Bluetooth Issues

[PatJensen]

Panther has serious bluetooth issues out of the box. The Bluetooth Setup Helper fails to run, from the menu bar or the new Bluetooth control panel. My Nokia 3650 and Microsoft Bluetooth Mouse both fail to work, using either my D-Link/Apple or Microsoft Bluetooth modules.

You can pair devices by hand, but they do not work under any applications. Also, once you pair a device the Bluetooth control panel goes nuts and corrupts the Window view so you have to close it.

Hopefully they fix this is the next build, I love my new Bluetooth mouse and it worked great in 10.2.6.

-Pat

Re:Serious Bluetooth Issues

[Alcimedes]

Panther has serious bluetooth issues out of the box

out of the box? there is no box to be out of. you're running a beta OS at best. they have misspelled words, non functional apps etc. of course there's stuff that doesn't work.

on the off chance that you're one of the few developers who are SUPPOSED to have this, i would expect you to shrug this off as typical in a beta build. otherwise this sucker comes with zero promises or warrenties.

Re:Serious Bluetooth Issues

[Rosyna]

That's because Bluetooth on panther is still nofunctional ;) It's just an alpha (if that) so far.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

I suppose Apple could implement a seamless-looking Cut & Paste functionality.

But the truth is the cut-n-paste is a metaphor that is only suitable for small data chunks that are 'easy' to duplicate. (eg bits of text) Files are not 'easy' to duplicate, in the sense that the time for duplication is linear to the size of the file. (do you really want to duplicate that 640MB CDROM image just to move it? Yes it's possible, but who wants to wait that long for duplication just to move the damn file?) Also since HFS is much more heavily based on an inode-like structure, a duplicate-then-erase function (which is what cut really is) is a very different beast semantically than a simple move. For a texteditor, cut/paste works fine. But for the Finder you really want move/duplicate.

-1: Copyright Infringement

[esme]

No seriously, mod the parent down. Reprinting an entire article from a site that makes all it's income from ads is not Informative: it's just regular copyright infringement. There isn't even an annoying registration requirement like the NY Times.

This guy is even karma-whoring by not posting anonymously.

-Esme

Re:/.ed already

[Draoi]

... so what's that got to do with "wonderful OSX", the previous poster's comment?

Pete C (pluggin' along quite nicely on OSX.3 preview, thanks!)

Re:Google cache

[ThePatrioticFuck]

Uh huh, and what the heck is a chofman's IBM blah blah?

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[displaced80]

Uhh... spring-loaded folders?

Highlight source file(s). Click & Hold. Drag to Macintosh HD (or a folder alias, toolbar shortcut, folder, whatever) and hover....

Location springs open in a new window. Repeat. Drill down to the final location, and use Cmd/Option modifiers to specify move, copy or alias.

Or, investigate apps like Xshelf, which are also useful.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[digicrom]

You can cut and paste files... right click a file and select copy (control click for single button users), then paste it at will. If you don't like that method then "option" drag...

addendum: Re:interesting

[platypus]

WTF is up with Boromir son of Faram?
Looking at his user page shows an astounding mass of clueless posts (sadly, some moderate quite high).

Looks like a live expirement with a opencyc.

My Panther Notes

[themexican]

Overall the enhancements make Panther a must have upgrade. I'm especially keen on the Finder's live sorting and the overall speed (even when dealing with huge folders).

Exposé is so good that after only a day or two of using panther, I now find myself reaching for it when I am back on jaguar (or on windows/linux machines).

As always I have a few notes.

The Finder

1. The metallic interface should be optional.

2. Column view still lacks sorting by anything other than 'name' in column view. I would suggest adding sorting options via a contextual menu.

3. Fonts, HTML, EPS and any file handled by quicktime should be previewable right in the finder.

4. Contextual menus need to be smarter. For example if I click on a font or a saver file I should be able to send it to it's proper folder.

5. Lack of customizability is still a major complaint. There is still no way to change the font, to set the style of the desktop font, or to control grid spacing. Also we are limited to 10 point minimum font size.

6. Finder windows still take up too much screen real estate. If apple used small scrollbars it would save a significant # of pixels per window.

7. The finder still does not respect drag and drop locations when something is dropped on the desktop. This is a major sin in my book.

8. Minimization of fields in list view is still one of my pet peeves.

Why minimize 'Date Modified' to 'Dat..fied" when it could be "Date"
Why minimize 'Size' to "..." instead of 'Size' or 'kb'
Why does 48KB go from "4..b" to "..b" to "..." instead of "48k", "48", "48"... and so on. The kind field is especially dumb.

Also why doesn't the text get more condensed as it did in OS 9 when the field gets narrow.

9. Labels for items that one does not have permission to label should be handled more gracefully. Right now if you try to label something out of your permission range the labels are simply not selectable. This will be confusing to many users who don't understand permissions.

10. The way labels are indicated in column view is extremely confusing. Especailly if your highlight color is similar to a label, labeled items appear to have been selected.

11. The admin should be able to control what kind of finder window a user sees and they should be able to control which drives/folders are available within the finder window.

12. A new (better) folder design would be appreciated.

13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).

The Dock

The current dock is great for computer newbies and casual users, but it quickly breaks down when power users are in production on a big project.

1. Exposé is fantastic, but it still does not solve the problem of minimized windows (it does not show windows minimized to the dock although it probably should). While minimized windows will be used less often when users get the hang of Exposé, there is still a need for some sort of windowshading that allows for speedy one or two click window swapping. I personally miss having windowshade from OS 9 and had a haxie installed to add this behavior. Even better is minimize-in-place hack from unsanity which recently became available. I have found shading invaluable in production. The standard OS X minimize/maximize simply takes too long to swap between windows and windows get lost in the dock. Also exposé, does not solve the problem of window clutter (many of our designers are clean desktop sort of people), while some sort of shading allows for clean desktops and efficient production. 3rd party hacks are great, but having it built in would be better.

2. Grouping would really help the power user. I currently have 80 items in the dock and can never find anything. I use all my apps frequently so I want easy access to them. If instead of having them all minimized, I had springlloaded tabs in the manner of O

Re:My Panther Notes

[awtbfb]

Dock
2. Grouping would really help the power user. I currently have 80 items in the dock and can never find anything...

In Jaguar, I have a few category folders in my dock below the bar (e.g., a folder of aliases to frequently used apps, important document folders, etc.). Whenever I want an item in one of these folders, I control-click (or right click, or click & hold) on the folder and select what I want from the pop-up menu. I've found that having fewer contents produces much faster response times. You can even use custom folder icons to make it easier to identify the category folder you want.

Re:My Panther Notes

[themexican]

The folder method doesn't work for me for two important reasons.

1. Folders in the dock all look alike unless I create custom folders.

2. I have to click hold and drag which is very different than click, click.

In OS 9 I had six labeled tabs each with about 20 items. This gave me two click access to about 120 items. This is the standard I am working against. I'm not saying the dock should emulate this exactly, but fast hierarchical access to a decent number of frequently used items is important for people like me who work with lots of apps.

Truth be told, OS X has two third party apps which ease my pain somewhat:

Launchbar is genius and is my main launching tool these days. It is the perfect geek too. But it doesn't allow me to browse a category... let's say vector graphics apps... in order to "discover" a tool I might use.

Dragthing takes up the rest of the slack providing 90% of the functionality of the old style tabs. My only criticism is that drag thing is not built in and integrated at a core level.

While I love these apps, I believe that Apple could put the same team that came up with Exposé to come up with a fantastic solution to this problem so that all users would benefit.

Re:My Panther Notes

[withnothingtodo]

Using the folder in the dock technique DOES allow for 2 click access to apps:

Right click, left click.

The problem with undifferentiated folders does, however, still exsist.

Re:My Panther Notes

[wareadams]

13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).

If you option-drag a mounted disk image to another location it becomes a folder containing the disk image contents. It could be easier if you could do this without mounting the image, but since Safari mounts the images on download it's not so bad.

Re:My Panther Notes

[Elwood P Dowd]

1. Folders in the dock all look alike unless I create custom folders.

No, because the only folders that you put in the dock are system-identified: your home directory and the system's applications directory. Maybe pictures, documents, music. They all look unique.

2. I have to click hold and drag which is very different than click, click.

As others have said, right-click, click. If you're working with a trackpad, you're used to tapping and holding anyway, so it's not jarring.

I'm a power user, and I love the dock. It has no shortcomings for me. The only things I keep in the dock are the apps that are basically always running anyway.

Not quite

[ciryon]

The new Finder is metal now so it looks more like the other iApps, especially iTunes. I don't think it's a problem since most of the Finder is whitespace anyway. It's not there now, but I really hope Apple makes it easy to choose different interfaces in the full release.

Personally I don't like the idea of having the "shortcuts" to the left like in windows xp. I'm pretty sure it's just something Apple created so windows switchers would feel at home. In windows the shortcuts are direly needed since everything is so difficult to find. In OS X the stuff are placed logically, no shortcuts needed. Plus, you can already in Jaguar place shortcuts in the top menu.

Ciryon

Re:Not quite

[JHromadka]

Personally I don't like the idea of having the "shortcuts" to the left like in windows xp. I'm pretty sure it's just something Apple created so windows switchers would feel at home.

Actually, I think it is to make iTunes users feel more at home. Instead of playlists, you have aliases to popular items.

fix your Safari

[switcha]

Get thee to lordofthecows and get Safari Enhancer. You can remove underlines, activate debugging menu, set minimum font sizes, give Safari a (very pretty) Aqua interface, and other maintenance and bookmark tweaks.

A very useful "no need for getting under the hood" app and worth the donation just for the Aqua.

Warning with Macintosh Manager/networking/RAID

[BAM0027]

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.

Steve's Own Words...

[irving47]

"We call it aqua because it looks so good, you want to lick it." -Steve Jobs. MacWorld San Francisco Keynote. OS X's first big demo.

So what now? We lick the metal-brushed windows? They'd better be nice and smooth or I'll get metal splinters in my tongue. Wait... What if they're not warm enough? I don't want to get those things frozen stuck on my tongue!
Give me my aqua, por favor.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[TheNetAvenger]

But the truth is the cut-n-paste is a metaphor that is only suitable for small data chunks that are 'easy' to duplicate. (eg bits of text) Files are not 'easy' to duplicate, in the sense that the time for duplication is linear to the size of the file. (do you really want to duplicate that 640MB CDROM image just to move it? Yes it's possible, but who wants to wait that long for duplication just to move the damn file?)

I guess I am totally missing what you are trying to convey.

Cutting and Pasting a file on the same volume should ONLY entail changing the entry in the FS table, and not move the data, just its pointed location.

So why would this be any different for a small file and a large file?

I must be completely missing something in your post, and apologize up front.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[TheNetAvenger]

Because it is something you can easily do in MS Windows, Apple has deemed it evil and will never implement it. ;)

Just like a two button mouse, pure evil...

*smile*

Well, uh no.

[Marrow]

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.

MAC Target Audience

[wo1verin3]

A quick glace of Apple's Panther Preview Page reveals to me the level of techical ability that Apple sees in its target market.

-------
Panther will include a final X11 window server for Unix-based apps, improved NFS/UFS, FreeBSD 5 innovations as well as support for popular Linux APIs, IPv6 and other important acronyms.
-------

I wish they'd lay off the acronym support until they get those vowels working properly!

Re:MAC Target Audience

[shiva600]

It's funny. Laugh.

This was a joke Jobs made during his presentation.
A pretty well recieved one at that.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[ocelotbob]

I've used cut/paste in gui-based file managers for years. While I usually have the directory open in another window/fm frame, sometimes I haven't created it yet, or it's only a couple directories away, and I don't want to fuss with resizing my fm just for a few files.

Besides, a good file management program won't cut/copy the actual file to the clipboard, just their location. When you paste to the new location, it just goes in and either moves or copies the file, the actual contents never touching the clipboard.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

Cutting and Pasting a file on the same volume should ONLY entail changing the entry in the FS table, and not move the data, just its pointed location.

OK, what if you want to:

• Paste the file twice, after cutting it once?

  (Admittedly doable after a bit of under-the-hood hacking, but you've just stretched your metaphor rather thin.)

• Move the file to a different filesystem (volume, network, etc). That requires moving the data.

I suppose Apple could implement the cut'n paste metaphor and restrict its use to intra-volume files. But they didn't want newbies worrying their pretty little heads about volumes, partitions, and networks. So is Mr Newbie going to use cut'n paste (which only works within this here 'volume' thingy), or is Mr Newbie going to use move 'n duplicate, which doesn't require any knowledge about volumes?

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[Arslan ibn Da'ud]

Right. A good filebrowser can handle cut/copy/paste and only duplicate data under the hood when necessary. (I use KDE's file browser, but its cut/paste flakes out on me sometimes.)

But just because you can force the metaphor to work with some behind-the-scenes hackery doesn't mean its a good metaphor. The only real advantage of cut'n paste is that you are already familiar with it from wordprocessing. Bottom line, cut'n paste can be tweaked to work for file browsers, but move/duplicate is a better metaphor because it doesn't require as much tweaking.

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[BitGeek]

You get to complain about apples support of open source the day you create the second most popular operating system in the world, and then choose to open source it!

There are more computers out there running OS X than Linux, and if Apple hadn't decided to pay more than lipservice to open source, that wouldn't be the case.

Microsoft pays lip service to open source. Apple has earned, and deserves, your respect.

After their technology was stolen from them for 20 years, they decided to start protecting it. Good for them.

Open source isn't about pirating technology- it is about the creators of innovations freely sharing that technology.

Hell, if Apple had been awarded the patent they'd applie for way back when, we wouldn't have the Microsoft goliath making our lives miserable today. (And if you think Apple is just as bad, or worse than Microsoft, your living in your own reality distortion field.)

Re:What the hell are you talking about?

[eparkin]

While you are apparently a trolling ac, I actually will respond by saying that no, I'm NOT CFO, I'm the CTO. Tech decisions are rightfully made by myself along with the other techs at our company, not accountants. Everyone has their field of specialty and deciding which technology is best to get the job done isn't the job of the CFO. They hire old school geeks such as myself who keep current on what's what to make the right choices, not spend frivously or waste money. Cheaper doesn't always equate with better. I do run linux at work, and have several boxen at home, however that has been changing to OS X in many cases, and no, I'm not a linux newbie, I've been using it at home since Slackware 4.0 or so (though I was exposed to it earlier than that), though I prefer FreeBSD whenever possible.

Refining

[Infonaut]

Or it could be that they're refining it based on feedback and their own ongoing development. It's almost impossible to get something right the first time, particularly in software development.

New interface + speed

[xyrw]

I've seen several comments about how the new interface isn't as pretty as Aqua, and also how Panther feels snappier than Jaguar.

I'd like to suggest a reason for this: the new interface seems to lack some of the transparency that was present in Jaguar. This could make it much faster, since transparency, even as handled by Quartz Extreme, still takes a bit more time than no transparency-- especially with fade-in effects.

Try it on Jaguar: Use Unsanity's Fruit Menu to turn off transparency in the menus and see that they drop down instantaneously rather than fading in.

Of course, I could be horribly mistaken...

Re:New interface + speed

[oscarmv]

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...

Re:New interface + speed

[chrispy666]

Actually I'm running that wwdc panther preview on my powerbook, and well I haven't noticed the lack of transparency : for that, everything looks like in Jaguar, but it is indeed MUCH faster.

Take the confirmation boxes that slip down from the menu bar : they appear so fast, that actually you can't even 'admire' the pretty effects anymore !

anyways, this IS indeed a beta version : cds are 60% not recognized, you have to eject them and slip them in a few times before their content show up properly; the battery status shows an insanely high percentage (4568979123 % remaining, anyone ?) ; it is nearly impossible to burn a cd; etc, etc.

but it feels a hell lot faster than Jaguar, and the new flatter style for some of the widgets is actually welcome and easier on the eyes (at least for me)

Too bad we have to wait until the end of the year to install the retail version, coz this Panther sure does make my PB 1Ghz FEEL like it's really 1Ghz ! (i.e. read : "fast !")

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[ennerseed]

A. What is wrong with having multiple ways of doing things?
B. Limiting ways to do things, especially on something that has simillar implementations throughout the OS, sucks.
C. With having a key command-able way of cutting and pasting files you can swiftly move them without the need for a mouse throughout the entire process.
D. Having to use the mouse all the time sucks.
E. Yes, you can use spring loaded folders.
F. Options don't suck.
G. Jag has a poor implementation of spring loaded folders.
H. Having an action behave differently each time you use it, see: popup here, slide there, sucks.
I. Spring loaded folders creates window clutter.
J. Window clutter sucks.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[TheNetAvenger]

I suppose Apple could implement the cut'n paste metaphor and restrict its use to intra-volume files. But they didn't want newbies worrying their pretty little heads about volumes, partitions, and networks. So is Mr Newbie going to use cut'n paste (which only works within this here 'volume' thingy), or is Mr Newbie going to use move 'n duplicate, which doesn't require any knowledge about volumes?

Ok, got it... Although I still disagree with the Apple metaphor on this.

Thanks for reclarifying it...

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[Surak]

You get to complain about apples support of open source the day you create the second most popular operating system in the world, and then choose to open source it!

Mac OS X isn't open source. Darwin is. There's a *very* large difference.

There are more computers out there running OS X than Linux, and if Apple hadn't decided to pay more than lipservice to open source, that wouldn't be the case.

No, there are more Macintoshes out there. I doubt very much that there are more computers running OS X. Besides, if having more users meant that they were better somehow, nobody would be complaining about Microsoft.

After their technology was stolen from them for 20 years, they decided to start protecting it. Good for them.

Do you know why the 'trash can' in Windows is called the 'recycle bin'? Because Apple patented the trash can icon, sued Microsoft and won. This was, in fact, almost 20 years ago.

Open source isn't about pirating technology- it is about the creators of innovations freely sharing that technology.

Which Apple clearly ISN'T doing with Expose, or with major portions of OS X.

Hell, if Apple had been awarded the patent they'd applie for way back when, we wouldn't have the Microsoft goliath making our lives miserable today.

They *did* get the look and feel patent, and it was upheld by the court, they just lost the case in court because the judge felt that Microsoft's GUI was different enough from Apple's. Go figure.

(And if you think Apple is just as bad, or worse than Microsoft, your living in your own reality distortion field.)

No, I don't. But I think that Mac fanboys give Apple wayyy more credit than they deserve. Apple is a good company. They are one of the good guys, for the most part. But if you think that for one minute that their goal with Mac OS X was *anything* except to capitalize on and commercialize the success of open source development and take financial advantage of the Linux movement, then *you* are the one living in your own reality distortion field.

'Places' not new

[er333]

The 'places' column seeems to be just a vertical version of the finder toolbar, which goes back to the NextStep shelf, which was introduced about 15 years ago.

Consider this...

[ElectusUnum]

While I personally like the brushed-metal style, I remember a lot of apps that would remove it from the Safari Beta; replacing it with the aqua look. I'm no expert, but is it possible such utilities will be made for the finder after Panther's release? Maybe someone with more knowledge of the UI could elaborate.

Something must be wrong with yours

[OS24Ever]

I've got a Powerbook 12" that I've had since March. I just roated the screen far forward, and far back, and i can read all my bookmark bar buttons and everything in the top of safari

I don't get the Places sidebar

[pauljlucas]

I mean, you could put local disk places (like Home, Applications, Network, etc) in the Dock. Clicking and holding pops up a menu so you can go to sub-places even. Hence I don't see why Steve is all excited about the Places sidebar.

Re:I don't get the Places sidebar

[andfarm]

The Places sidebar also shows up in Open/Save windows. Try getting stuff from the Dock to show up in file dialogs...

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[Eccles]

The only real advantage of cut'n paste is that you are already familiar with it from wordprocessing.

No, it is faster. I work a lot with both systems, and option-dragging a file on a Mac to a different directory is simply slower than cut, find target directory, and paste. I'm also fumble-fingered enough that I occasionally drop a dragged item at a different location than I intended, and cleaning that up is a hassle. Lastly, click-and-drag is harder on the clicking finger.

If you read the parent, read this, too

[Mikey-San]

I agree with a good deal of what you've said, but I have several major complaints (this IS Slashdot, after all):

2. Column view still lacks sorting by anything other than 'name' in column view. I would suggest adding sorting options via a contextual menu.

No. You should never have settings or options available only via contextual menus, which a TON of users never even see. If they're in a contextual menu, find a place elsewhere for them, as well.

3. Fonts, HTML, EPS and any file handled by quicktime should be previewable right in the finder.

I don't agree with this, either. Perhaps QuickTime, but why everything else? Why not let the Finder do what everyone has bitched about the Finder being bad at since the beginning of OS X, and be a good navigation tool? (I like Jag's Finder, but nothing is ever perfect.) Concentrate on making the Finder let you find shit first and foremost. It doesn't need to be a Swiss Army Knife, it just needs to pass font files to the FontBookThingy app. Bing, done.

4. Contextual menus need to be smarter. For example if I click on a font or a saver file I should be able to send it to it's proper folder.

Same thing as the first point. Contextual menus should only provide a convenient grouping of commonly used commands that pertain to the object you've clicked on to generate the contextual menu you're looking at.

This may also confuse more people, since you have your font folder and the system's font folder. How do you distinguish between the difference(s) for the average (non-geek) user?

6. Finder windows still take up too much screen real estate. If apple used small scrollbars it would save a significant # of pixels per window.

The scroll bars and window title bars are the same size in OS X and OS 9. For example, the window title bars are 22 pixels tall in both 9 and X.

11. The admin should be able to control what kind of finder window a user sees and they should be able to control which drives/folders are available within the finder window.

Hmm . . . I agree with the second half of that, as long as you're not restricting items in someone's home folder (duh), but that first part is an interesting point. Should a user be forced to see certain styles of windows for different folders? I dunno.

Perhaps only if the admin couldn't screw with the window of a folder that belonged to them. I think that's how Jaguar does it, but I'm really not sure.

12. A new (better) folder design would be appreciated.

What's wrong with the current folder icon? Get a system icon replacement thingie from ResExcellence or wherever.

13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).

Apple does something similar with "Internet-enabled disk images". I think they're shitty, though, since I can't look at a .dmg file and tell that it's going to delete itself once I double-click it. Some of us like to back up the things we download, and self-trashing .dmgs totally screw that up.

1. Exposé is fantastic, but it still does not solve the problem of minimized windows (it does not show windows minimized to the dock although it probably should). While minimized windows will be used less often when users get the hang of Exposé, there is still a need for some sort of windowshading that allows for speedy one or two click window swapping. I personally miss having windowshade from OS 9 and had a haxie installed to add this behavior. Even better is minimize-in-place hack from unsanity which recently became available. I have found shading invaluable in production. The standard OS X minimize/maximize simply takes too long to swap between windows and windows get lost in the dock. Also exposé, does not solve the problem of window clutter (many of our designers are clean desktop sort of people), while some s

Re:If you read the parent, read this, too

[themexican]

Not a flame, just a response...

No. You should never have settings or options available only via contextual menus, which a TON of users never even see. If they're in a contextual menu, find a place elsewhere for them, as well.

Panther provides an action menu icon in the finder that just shows the contextual menu options available. This should mainly solve this problem.

I disagree with your contextual menu religiosity in general. Many users still doesn't know where fonts should be installed. Or pref panes, or anything else that needs to be in a specific folder. The contextual menu is a perfect place for allowing a user to do this semi-automatically. As the menu in Panther is selected from an icon, it should be semi-obvious and makes sense. Contextual menus aren't bad just because many people don't use them. they are a way for users to get certain esoteric tasks done quickly.

re the dock:

If you have 80 items in the Dock, the Dock is not your problem

Actually I had 80 items. With Launch Bar & Drag Thing in place I now have seven items

re finder screen real estate:

The scroll bars and window title bars are the same size in OS X and OS 9. For example, the window title bars are 22 pixels tall in both 9 and X.

True, but now in Panther you have a sidebar, a top bar, and multiple scroll bars in column view. That's a whole bunch of pixels.

Re can opener finder

The Safari rendering engine is built in. Quicktime is built in. Why would you not show these in preview? It costs you very little. Preview can be turned off if you don't like spending the cycles. As for fonts, previewing in the finder is something that would make the life of virtually every designer (a core Mac market) easier

Re:If you read the parent, read this, too

[Mikey-San]

So tell me why, when I downloaded Adobe Reader 6's .dmg, and double-clicked it, it installed itself and vanished.

They're not /all/ playing nice.

Congratulations!

[wirelessbuzzers]

That was the most brillian troll I've seen in a long time. Please, mod up to +5, troll.

You can get a the images here...

[Jontu_Kontar]

Thinksecret Panther (OS 10.3) Images I'm not certian how much bandwidth I have to this location so it may not work if too many people download it. (So if someone could .Torrent it?)

"I'm not cool enough to wear a pink shirt!"

[Thud457]

Whatever happened to Taligent??!!!

Re:"I'm not cool enough to wear a pink shirt!"

[BeerCat]

As I was clearing out some old Mac Users (from around 1998 or so), there was an item that Taligent and Kaleida had both been disbanded/ dissolved.

Re:My unanswered questions. (mail)

[saitoh]

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.

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[IamTheRealMike]

You have to be smoking something. The FreeType team had to spend literally years working on an autohinter because Apple would not waive the patent on TrueType bytecode hinting. This is despite using practically the entirety of XFree as an OS level feature to sell more of their kit.

There have already been features that people wanted to implement in Gnome at least, but were scared off by Apples patents. They know all about this, but choose not to budge.

The fact is that Apple would be massively worse than Microsoft were their positions reversed. Say what you like about Microsoft but they have zero history of patent or lawsuit abuse.

direct link to images

[mah!]

While downloads are still quite slow, here's a direct link to their images directory.

Point iCab to it and let it download all of them to avoid having to click on each one...

Relax; it's only DRM

[yerricde]

Talk about bad interface -- [WMP9] didn't even include the ability to fast forward or rewind!

Relax; it's only digital restrictions management.

Rewind, and you view something several times that you paid to view only once, transforming a "public performance" of a copyrighted audiovisual work into a "public display". The streaming video provider may not have been licensed to offer public displays.

Fast-forward, and you skip the commercials that you are obligated to have displayed by the TOS you signed with the streaming video provider.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[n.wegner]

>is only suitable for small data chunks that
>are 'easy' to duplicate...but who wants to wait
>that long for duplication just to move the damn
>file?)

It makes it easier for me to duplicate, which is all I care about. I don't mind if it's fire-and-forget.

Set default by the machine's case?

[yerricde]

How about this? Install it on a plastic computer (gumdrop iMac, lamp iMac, eMac, iBook, or older G3/G4), and you get Aqua controls by default. Install it on a pre-Ti PowerBook, and you get Dark Aqua. Install it on a metal computer (TiBook, HgMac, Power Mac G5), and you get brushed metal.

Would setting the default appearance for on-screen controls to match the appearance of the computer's case prove too confusing to users?

Not a replacement for multiple desktops!

[artemis67]

The problem having multiple users logged in is the load that it puts on the system. The XP systems that I've used slow to a crawl when you switch users.

At least with multiple desktops you're not loading things multiple times.

Proof that Apple's planning to drop Aqua

[yerricde]

Brushed metal started innocently enough: QuickTime Player emulates a DVD player. iTunes emulates a stereo system.

But now Apple could be taking the metaphor too far in an effort to de-emphasize Aqua, by recognizing that almost every app on a computer "emulates" something outside the computer and by encouraging third party developers to recognize the same.

Roxio Toast (or whatever they call the Mac version of Easy CD Creator) emulates a CD-Audio recorder.

Word processor emulates a typewriter.

Adobe Photoshop emulates a darkroom and an easel.

PIM emulates a card file.

VisualBoyAdvance emulates a GBA.

RealPC (coming soon) emulates an x86 PC.

Re:Proof that Apple's planning to drop Aqua

[HTH NE1]

Safari emulates the Web?

Re:Proof that Apple's planning to drop Aqua

[yerricde]

Web browser emulates a newspaper.

Web browser emulates a TV.

Web browser emulates a radio.

Web browser emulates a record store.

Web browser emulates a bookstore.

Re:Proof that Apple's planning to drop Aqua

[jo42]

Repeat after me: "The Web browser, as a user interface, to anything, SUCKS!".

Copy and paste in Finder works just fine for me

[Andre Breton]

" Why not make it just like copy where you can select the file, go to the edit menu and click copy, and then navigate to where you want to paste the file?"

Uhhhh... (what the...?) What exactly gives you the idea that it doesn't work like that?

Re:Copy and paste in Finder works just fine for me

[drsmithy]

Because you can't *CUT* a file doing that. Ie, you can't *move* files the same way you can *copy* them.

Re:Copy and paste in Finder works just fine for me

[Andre Breton]

"Because you can't *CUT* a file doing that."

For one the grandparent talked about copying in the posting. Second I don't trust a lousy clipboard that far. Means cut and paste would be far to dangerous IMHO.

Re:Copy and paste in Finder works just fine for me

[drsmithy]

For one the grandparent talked about copying in the posting.

The grandparent is clearly talking about moving files - ie: cutting. It's asking why Apple can't make it work *like* "copy"ing currently does.

Second I don't trust a lousy clipboard that far. Means cut and paste would be far to dangerous IMHO.

You don't put the actual file data into the clipboard, you just register that the user wants to cut - ie: move - a file from one place to another.

If Microsoft managed to do it sucessfully in Windows back in 1995, I'm sure Apple can do it now.

What's old is new again, apparently

[vonPoonBurGer]

The "new" Finder isn't really that new at all. In fact, much of its basic design is so old it hurts. Have a look at this screenshot from the NextStep OS, and note the "File Viewer". Now compare it to this pic of the "new" Finder's column view. Apparently Mr. Jobs is using his position to bring back as many NextStep-isms as he can. That wouldn't be a bad idea, except the NextStep File Viewer pretty much sucks compared to more modern means of browsing a file system. You get a separate column for every subfolder; more than three levels deep, and it gets difficult to navigate with the column view. Personally, I like folders as a means of organizing files, and things often get nested pretty deep. My experience with NextStep makes me think that trying to browse anything but the flatest of filesystems will likely be horrendously painful with this "new" Finder.

Re:What the hell are you talking about?

[AKAImBatman]

Who are you the CTO for, and where do I apply? (GET ME OUT OF WINDOWS HELL!!!)

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[mindstrm]

They have zero history of patent or lawsuit abuse because they don't need them, because they are the top dog.

Apple, on the other hand, has to protect what it has.

Panther Finder comments

[Jackmon]

1. Brushed metal borders IMO are too large... especially at the top. I don't have a problem with the look... I think the aesthetic is ok. I just think there's a lot of wasted screen real-estate.

2. No "UP" button for going up a directory. Why not have three buttons instead of two, as in this really bad ascii diagram:
<- /|\ ->
Currently the Back button takes you to the last directory you were in, which is not always the same as "Up". I know you can use the path pulldown or Command-click on the title bar to access your full path, but going up one directory is just such a common task that it really seems like there should be a one-click way to do it.

3. Column view: IMO, the default behavior when moving the partitions, should be to move only the partion you're currently moving... not all of them. I.e. The behavior when you "Alt" drag should be the default, and "Alt" drag should perform the current default behavior.

4. Also column view. Would be really cool to have selected directories align in the vertical middle of the finder. (almost the way slot machine symbols do but without the spinning). That would have a nice visual appearance, and also allow the user to read the path along a straight line.

5. Is there a way to get a display of the current path on the title bar? Static text would be ok, or even better, maybe something along the lines of CocoaTech's path finder. http://www.cocoatech.com/screenshots/pathfinder

This is nice both because you always know where you are when you're navigating, and also because you can navigate immediately to any directory in your current path with one click.

6. As far as I can tell, there's no way to resize finder windows except for the bottom right corner. With all the extra brushed metal... or even a little bit less ;-) ... there's a perfect opportunity to add resizing elements on the top, bottom, right, and left edges of the window. (I know, I know, it's a Windows idiom ;-) but it's still a good one).

7. Is there a way to change the font in the finder? This was possible in OS 9 but seems missing in OSX.

Re:Panther Finder comments

[Maserati]

2. cmd-uparrow works in 10.2.6. It'd be nice to have a button though.

6. A pet peeve of a lot of us.

7. TinkerTool does this iirc.

Wallstreet Powerbook G3 Support Dropped

[NetFusion]

Upsetting to learn my Wallstreet G3 is being left out in the cold because it has no USB port. OS X ran great on it and breathed new life into the machine making it my favorite computer once more, despite its age.

Hope they reconsider. =o{

Re:Wallstreet Powerbook G3 Support Dropped

[unicode]

I second that emotion!!!!!!

NICE TROLL MAN! (7/10)

[Knife_Edge]

"10.3 Panther will not run on G5's"

Sounds remotely plausible, yet is completely unconfirmable since the G5s have not yet shipped. You have the beginning of a fine troll here. However, a few problems.

How are YOU getting word from Apple? You must really be in the loop to know about this. Boy, they sure screwed up bigtime with this goof. Thanks for letting us know. Still, whether you are in the know is completely unconfirmable, so it is not a big deal.

The real issue with this troll is that you are not going into enough detail. A truly excellent troll would have a list of bullet points detailing the problem Apple was having, and all the workarounds they were developing. The expose thing is a start, but just not enough.

Still, the post is shocking enough to merit a 7/10 score. I think it is a shame you didn't develop your idea further. With some work this could be the next BSD is dying troll. Like this classic troll, it might even have versatility, depending on when Apple or other companies release hardware and software.

I doubt the original troll will last long, though.

Mod parent up, please

[nkrumm]

Im out of points.

Re: multiple docs

[doofusdan]

> 3. Multiple docks. One for office apps. One for games. One for graphical/web apps.

Here's an idea - how about using fast user switching to set up 3 different "users" - one for office apps, one for games, one for graphical/web apps etc - and just switch between them? Another take on workspaces.

Brushed metal as a synonym for Apple

[oboylet]

12"/17" AlBooks The G5' All the apple branded Apps (even QT6 for win). Notice a trend? It's brushed metal outside and inside. Apple is and always has branded both a look and a feel. Mac apps work a certain way, and the hardware the run on tend to look a certain way. It's a hardware/software theme. There were snow (aqua-ish?) iBooks/iMacs and eMacs. The current color uniting apple hardware and software is brushed metal. peace. todd

OS X versions reflect hardware

[Sudderth]

The original "lickable" OS X interface -- right down to the thin horizontal gray lines on menu bars and window borders -- almost certainly was designed to resemble the original iMac and Blue-and-White G3. The design aesthetics reinforced each other, and even extended to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which gives you the choice of browser chrome to match your hardware (including the venerable Bondi Blue).

Apple went out of its chromatic phase in a blaze of glory with the regrettable "Blue Dalmatian" and "Flower Power" iMacs. Ever since then they've moved in a more elegant direction, with no more dramatic change than the shift from colorful, purse-like iBooks to today's snowy variant. OS X has looked dated in comparison -- it did its job too well. It's no coincidence that as brushed metal themes are emerging more and more often, especially in the new Finder, that the new G5's following suit.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[Phroggy]

H. Having an action behave differently each time you use it, see: popup here, slide there, sucks.

What are you talking about?

I. Spring loaded folders creates window clutter.
J. Window clutter sucks.

All the intermediate windows close automatically as soon as you finish dragging.

Re:This is the kind of feature that we want to see

[TheRaven64]

Features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, show desktop, context-sensitive help, tooltips, etc don't add to what you can acheive with your software but they do add to the richness of your user-experience by making software more flexible and user-friendly.

Especially mouse gestures. I've lost count of the number of times I've waved my mouse around over nautilus or explorer and wondered why the window didn't close, or why it hadn't taken me back. Opera has a lot to answer for...

Themes, no Beige G3 support

[istewart]

Just in case anybody from Apple is reading...

I'm quite glad to hear the number of positive reports about the new Finder; I guess that means the thing that bothers me most from the screenshots is the Brushed Metal interface. It just doesn't fit for me. I'd like to have theme support back as it was in OS 8.5->9.2. Not that I'm pining for the days of Classic or anything, but I would eagerly use a Platinum theme or Dark Platinum from OS X Server 1.x. I would also take the current Aqua (with graphite buttons) over the new "toned-down" Aqua.

Another thing that bothers me is the lack of Beige G3 install support. With the new Sonnet 1GHz G4 ZIF or even the XLR8 800MHz G3 upgrade, I can make my Beige the rough equivalent of a more modern Mac desktop, tho possibly not a top of the line one and definitely not the G5. I'm not too terribly worried about it however, as XPostFacto will allow me to install even if Apple doesn't want me to.

Re:Themes, no Beige G3 support

[MoneyT]

There are some theming apps availible, but Apple was never big on themes. Even in OS 9 (and maybe 8, I forget if that had schemes) it was more just color schemes and not actual themes. You probably won't see new themes for a while except from third party people.

As for the biege G3, well like you said, you have an app to install it, but eventualy, we must all realize that our aging macs need to stay in the OS they have. I would love to see my old 5400/180 with the G3 upgrade running OS X, but it's really not feaseable, the computer works much better as a classic machine, and so that's where it will stay untill it finaly dies.

Re:This is the kind of feature that we want to see

[Hes Nikke]

I've not seen it in action, but Expose....

now you can see it in action (quicktime required, blah, blah, blah)

What about the little details?

[nystagman]

Is anyone else bothered by the loss of such basic interface clues such as grayed-out icons for open folders, or the highlighting that we used to see when clicking on the proxy icon (the mini in the title of a window) when preparing to drag it?

They don't sound like such a big deal, perhaps, but they truly convey a great deal of valuable information when implemented.

Also poorly done is the abysmal internal truncation ('...') of text in narrow fields when in list view. (Also applies to long file names in icon view.) I really miss the condensed type that 9 used in these cases.

"Get Info" functionality is limited, as it doesn't tell you how many items are in a folder, and I find it pretty useless that getting info on multiple items can not open multiple windows, to allow for easy comparisons.

And WHY do removable volumes NOT remember open windows when remounted? If I log out (or even restart!) with the drive connected, the windows are remembered. So why not when they are manually un/remounted? This is really inconvenient, since I routinely modify the contents of many directories during a normal working day, and would like those windows to remain open when I transfer my Firewire drive between computers.

I also hope the zoom-to-fit function is less broken than it currently is. Ditto for windows correctly remembering their settings. I am tired of that damned toolbar reappearing again and again in windows where I had turned it off.

And today I narrowly averted disaster, almost overwriting the wrong file, because its modification time will not update until I click on it. Ditto for adding files to a folder with a process other than the Finder. The window must be manually brought to the foreground (or actively selected if it is already there) before the files show up. Once again, this is a disaster waiting to happen.

So, rant aside, are ANY of these things addressed in Panther? I am resigned to not being able to turn off all the cycle-stealing eye candy (including the excessive use of translucency which is anathema to visual clarity), but since my next computer will be a G5, I suppose I'll just have to live with it... But I'd be greatly appreciative if more attention was paid to fixing the broken stuff than adding more new features to debug.

besides eye candy, whats it good for?

[Lawrence_Bird]

is it just me or is everybody fixated on eye candy? Why is every review just a bunch of screenshots? And the fixation on the 'finder' like a delphi oracle is beyond me. Like what are the real and tangible improvements in the OS? For me to pony up $100 whatever to upgrade my ibook after 9 months is kinda offensive unless the changes are win3.1->95 or 95->2k like, ie *major* improvements.

Its 2.3b1

[atomkraft]

Just for the record p;

Interesting that they chose to install beta software, but at least it should fix the https problem

Re:Its 2.3b1

[pnatural]

No, it will be 2.3 final.

Did you even bother to read the message from GvR? The quote:

Apple's schedule is such that August 1st is about the latest release date for Python 2.3 that will make this possible.

He's saying that py2.3 final has to be released by 1-aug to be included in panther. 2.3b2 was release just days ago, and we can look forward to rc1 and rc2 next month. guido wants to accellerate the release process a bit to make py2.3 final available by 1-aug.

aside -- i've been using 2.3b1 (and now b2) for weeks, and haven't had a problem.

bring back the purse

[commodoresloat]

I totally agree about the design aesthetic matching on the hardware and software. I do wish they would bring back the purse design laptop though, or make something new like it. The clamshell enclosure was great -- spacious; my fingers always feel cramped on notebook keyboards, but not that one. More importantly, it was rugged as hell. I've seen them dropped with no harm done; try that with a tibook. The new 12" Tibook is better in terms of being rugged but doesn't have that space. And I know everyone laughed at the purse thing but that handle was damn convenient for carrying your machine across the room! I would love to see a new clamshell enclosure from apple with a G4 or G5 in it. It doesn't have to be fruity looking; surely their designers can create an elegant but toned down design that retains the functionality of the clamshell....

Re:bring back the purse

[saintlupus]

I do wish they would bring back the purse design laptop though, or make something new like it.

Amen. My first generation Lombard (Powerbook G3/333) was among the oldest machines I saw at WWDC this year, but the dual bays (both of which I had batteries in) meant I could take notes and such all day while the people with the 17" Powerbooks were recharging at lunch.

And peripherals like the iSight are not going to help the situation any. I overheard someone who was using an iSight and a bus-powered Firewire drive on his 17" Powerbook lamenting his low battery life. I wonder what could have caused it.

--saint

Re:bring back the purse

[Elwood P Dowd]

I do wish they would bring back the purse design laptop though, or make something new like it.

You are definitely the only one. The screen on that thing was so heavy that it necessarily wore out its hinges after a year or so. My dad has one, and he basically has to balance the screen upright if he wants to use it on a desk.

And you are right, it was durable, but it had to be, given that it was about as easy to carry around in your backpack as an anvil. That thing was horrible.

Re:I love the Places sidebar! - the Shelf!

[MouseR]

You still can.

some panther notes

[Nomad37]

I've been using panther for a few days, and just thought I'd share some observations that no one else has yet mentioned:

* Fonts on brushed metal are a lot more solid. Especially at small font sizes, with smoothing off (on a powerbook's screen) the fonts are very crisp. I think some of the fonts are more "inset" in the metal than they were before

* Extremely cool searching in preview.app. A drawer is opened and search results come up as you type, per iTunes and now Finder. The drawer has little summaries of the surrounding text and page number... so useful! Just like a search eninge on the web.

* The new finder's icon: had to mention it: looks like it was drawn by a child. Yuck!

* Breaks uControl, which gave me virtual scrolling on my touchpad: so frickin hard to live without! Shall I have to buy a mouse?

* the menu item separators are now inset, like the aqua gel buttons: very slick, everything looks more solid, and less stuck on as an afterthought.

* iChat AV's voice feature is so great. I don't have video, while it would be cool, I'd have to look interested when talking to my parents (and not surf the web ;)

* All the updates to the finder and system put together means that aside from the dock not having multiple tabs or some such, I can finally use my computer as efficiently and _intuitively_ as I could ever wish:
- expose lets me see my desktop quickly for my commonly used items
- find in the finder window finally is usable and useful
- with the places holder on the left, it's somehow a lot easier to use the column view and jump to required place than when the icons were up in the toolbar (separation of concerns perhaps?
- everything just fits, like it was a handcrafted piece of woodwork: Beautiful =)

* This has been mentioned, but I'll mention it again: milk and brushed metal: I like both of them: in isolation. Thrown all together my machine now kinda looks like a badly designed KDE theme... all these different ways of viewing things mushed together. Even the volume level in iChat AV is out of place. As I say, they all look great in isolation, so hopefully the full release will meld these elements a bit better!

* To reply to themexican: I agree that customisability is lacking, especially if apple keeps changing its own ideas of how its computer should look.

* Also agree with themexican that it would be very cool if the action menu could auto send files like screensavers, etc to the right folder, but remember there's more than one "right folder"; ie: all users or just for this one, not that that couldn't be overcome of course!

* Disagree: Finder windows still take up too much screen real estate. If apple used small scrollbars it would save a significant # of pixels per window.

Make scrollbars too thin and they get hard to use: they take up space, but they are necessarily large so they are easy to use.

* Dock should act more like dragthing/tabbed windows pre-X. Or at least it should allow the use of separators a la toolbar

* Scrolling in Safari is much nicer. Smooth and all :^D

* themexican: My suggestion to enhance the multiple user experience would be to have an easy way for families to share iApp libraries between users.

Hell yes!!

It's to go with the G5 cases

[DABANSHEE]

I assume

Arn't they brushed aluminium?

Re:What the hell are you talking about?

[eparkin]

If you are in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, chuck me an email with a resume (ascii format is fine) and we'll talk. codearch at codearchitect.net and/or eparkin at op.net

My Panther experience.

[gklinger]

I installed Panther on my iBook last week and everything worked fine although I had a few iChatAV and Safari crashes (I don't think Safari is ready but they wanted something to release at the WWDC). I then installed it on my Power Macintosh (dual G4 450MHz aka "gigabit ethernet") and everything worked fine except the ethernet. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get the networking up. I'm going to see if I can get m friend to try it on his Powerbook (which also has gigabit ethernet) to narrow down the problem.

The only other odd thing was that I couldn't find the drive/folder encrytion feature. It was talked about at the WWDC but not shown and I don't believe it has been implemented yet. Oddly, GNU Chess was also missing. I grabbed the source code from Apple and used the new XCode to compile it and it worked flawlessly. XCode is great. Two clicks and I had a working binary. Very nicely integrated and well thought out. Kudos to Apple.

Bugs aside, Panther is an improvement. The only reservation I have is that Apple expects users to shell out another $129 to get it. Yearly OS updates at $129 are not going to be popular. I know Apple spends a lot on OS development but if they keep going back to the same well, the well will run dry.

Re:My Panther experience.

[michaelggreer]

It seems likely to me that they are doing this, not mainly to get people to buy the OS update, but to decide to buy a new computer. They price it high enough to make a new G5 seem reasonable.

Every New G4 Ships with OS 9?

[deaddeng]

Heard this on NPR's "Computer Guys" today. Whoa.

Re:Every New G4 Ships with OS 9?

[foo12]

They default to Mac OS X but still have OS 9 for compatibility

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[Paradise Pete]

if you think that for one minute that their goal with Mac OS X was *anything* except to capitalize on and commercialize the success of open source development and take financial advantage of the Linux movement, then *you* are the one living in your own reality distortion field.

I'm not so sure. Jobs is obsessed with making great things. If he chose to use open source software it was because he believed that with it could produce a great product. If he didn't think he could then no amount of money would have changed his decision.

Re:I love the Places sidebar!

[drsmithy]

Which part of copy != cut don't you comprehend ?

Easy to do it manually

[bursch-X]

If the Finder is a proper Cocoa app (which I believe it is in Panther) you can actually go in there yourself.

Right click on the application, select "Show Package Contents", in the Resources folder find the English.lproj folder and in there are several .nib files which make up the user interface of the application.

Now if you open these .nib files with Interface Builder (included in the Developer Tools), you can select get info and in Attributes you uncheck "Textured Window". Save it. Relaunch and your Metal app is an Aqua app again.

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[Surak]

I'm not so sure. Jobs is obsessed with making great things. If he chose to use open source software it was because he believed that with it could produce a great product. If he didn't think he could then no amount of money would have changed his decision.

You're kidding, right? The open source software community existed *well* before Jobs left Apple Computer sometime in the late mid-to-late 1980s. If Jobs thought open source was such a great idea *then* why didn't he use it in the creating of the original Macintosh?

The original Macintosh was one of the most proprietary, closed platforms that ever existed, a distinction that earned it the nickname 'beige toaster' by the open source hacker community in the 1980s. Apple patents were closely guarded, even then -- especially then.

Jobs wouldn't have *dreamed* of using open source then.

Yes, Jobs is in someways obsessed with making 'insanely great' products. But Jobs is also first and foremost a businessman and always has been. He's not a hacker, he's not an engineer. That's why he teamed up with Woz in the first place... Woz had the mad skills, but Jobs had the business vision. Don't forget that.

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[toph42]

They *did* get the look and feel patent, and it was upheld by the court, they just lost the case in court because the judge felt that Microsoft's GUI was different enough from Apple's. Go figure.
Actually, the judge agreed that the Windows GUI was a derivative work of the Mac GUI, but that Apple had granted Microsoft a license to create derivative works (unintentionally). Apple has been very diligent about protecting its patents ever since.
You know what they say: Once bitten, twice shy...

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[BitGeek]

Surak--

You're repeating incorrect information. This always seems to be the case with apple -- people tell lies and innocent people repeat these lies as if they were truth.

Apple was denied a patent on their GUI, but they did get copyright. The Microsoft case was a copyright case.

That you think Apple is profiting from Linux with OSX then you are delusional. They open sourced THEIR product (A BSD derivitive.)

To claim they are exploiting the linux market is just silly. After all, linux people never pay for anything, so what is there to exploit? And they'd never buy quality hardware, so apple has no chance to sell them hardware.

Come on. the insults are not necessary and this constant desperate need to deominize apple reeks of insecurity.

But on the patent thing, you're just wrong. Please don't repeat that misinformation.

Re:It all went downhill after Quicktime 6...

[BitGeek]

IF you ever actually READ the Apple HIG, you'd know you were wrong.

But then, as a anonymous Linux troll, you already knew you were wrong.

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[laird]

There was barely an open source community back in 1982 when the Macintosh was getting implemented (launched in 1984, remember?), so there really wasn't an open source community to participate in. When Jobs started NeXT, he based his OS on UNIX and Mach (relatively open/open source), with a proprietary layer on top that was the world's best development framework. Heck, it's been about 10 years, and it's _still_ the world's best development framework. The guy who came up with Interface Builder was brilliant. Anyway, the point is that whenever there have been good open standards (XML, USB, SCSI, 3.5" floppy disks, 802.11b/g, PCMCIA, OpenGL, TCP/IP, NuBus, OpenFirmware, Mach, etc.) Apple has adopted them (and often driven the specifications). Generally speaking, Apple has only introduced proprietary technologies when they were dramatically better than what was out there (Mac monitor ports that negotiated resolution between the computer and monitor, mice, AppleTalk, ADB) and when a standard emerged that caught up to what Apple had been providing, they've killed off their proprietary technology for the standard every time. The only way that they could be _less_ proprietary is for them to do as PC vendors do, which is to do no R&D and just ship whatever someone else invents. Personally, I'd rather support a company that advances the state of the art in advance of the standards, but which drives those advances into the standards, than a company that advances nothing but cost optimizing trailing edge technology.

Re:Don't forget that it's patented.

[BitGeek]

Uh, false. you are spreading fabricated fantasies, and pretending they are facts.

Apple didn't block implementation of features of Gnome due to patents.

The idea that Apple would be worse than Microsoft is laughable-- and can only come from someone who hates Success (microsoft) but hates innovation (Apple) even more.

Both are forms of success, and given your penchant for anti-human rights, anti-capitalism ranting on slashdot, your motivations are obvious.

Your fabrication, however, isn't going to stand unchallenged.