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Panther Released into the Wild
u2fan00 writes "Those fortunate enough to have an Apple Store near them were in for a treat last night -- crowds! Oh, and also Panther. Check out the local reactions, photos and stories from some stores across the nation."
Geeze. I saw the crowd last year at Lenox Mall in Atlanta for the Jaguar release, so I cleverly waited one entire day.
:-)
The Lenox Mall Apple store is a bit of a drive, so I went to the Micro Center not far from where I live. They're sort of a baby Fry's, but more expensive and nowhere near as good. This is, unfortunately, the South, and you take what you can get here. It beats Bosnia.
I walked into the Apple department, grabbed a copy of Panther, and asked if I needed to ring it up there or if I could keep shopping. The salesman put a sticker on it and told me to buy it up front, and then tossed a couple of freebies on the pile... a mousepad and a 64MB USB flash drive.
So I got a much shorter drive, no parking hassles, and a free USB drive in exchange for waiting a day. Calling this a no-brainer seems an understatement.
No impressions yet, I'm backing up before installing. Ok, one impression: the box is cool. Big silver X on a black background. Box upgrades are very important, you know.
... don't give educational discounts. You have to order online for that. So if you're a student, don't go trucking out to the store... you can't get it for $70 there.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Some people with in-house AirPort networks have run into difficulties after installing panther. If this is happening to you, Apple has already given a workaround here.
Also, Control-d now selects the dock and allows for keyboard navigation rather than getting sent to the app you want it to be sent to (such as terminal). I haven't figured out how to turn this off, but you can work around it by using the option key in addition to the control key (so Control-Option-d instead of just Control-d).
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Panther is cool; I like "Expose" pretty well.
For those unix types I have two issues so far:
1) the cocoa version of emacs I was using is broken by panther
2) the version of x11 I downloaded from apple is not automatically updated. You must update it manually from disc 3. Note that the old one is broken by panther.
I also needed to reinstall Microsoft Office X, but it is working fine now.
Included in the box (what a cool black box it is, too!) is a development environment CD (compilers, APIs, SDKs, and the xcode IDE).
I'm happy to see Apple still giving the development tools away for free.
The Max OS X Panther 10.3 box includes 4 CDs... three for 10.3 and it's accessories (keep in mind these three CDs include localizations for 12 languages)... and a development environment CD containing compilers, various SDKs, and the feature-filled xCode IDE.
It's a bit alien to those not used to the NeXT way, but it only took my roommate about 15 minutes to find his way around. Both of us have already converted most of our projects to xCode.
Gotta say I was drooling when they announced the G4 iBooks, lamenting my Applecare isn't up til May, but this has breathed new life into my iBook 500. I backed up to Peerless (hush - they were $50 EOL) and did an upgrade install - no problems so far. Given the backup, I may backup again now and do an erase install...
Everything is much faster. Mail.app has to reindex, Preview will now be my pdf viewer, and the calculator actually remembers which mode you quit it in. Sorry I paid for Koalacalc. The network panel is informative and rather than a clicking party.
Only drawback is without Quartz Extreme my Expose is doing about 3 fps, but it still does what's needed.
Only grip is that the new finder windows w/o toolbars have a very subtle facing - then you enable the new finder windows in full regalia, and they get the old brushed metal, which looks rough in comparison.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
After using 10.0 for a few months, my mind started melting away and Apple released 10.1. Yay.
After using 10.1 for almost a year, my sanity for a sane user experience started wearing thin. Finally Apple released 10.2, which was also much snappier. And it was something to rival OS 9 in a give-or-take competition for usability vs. stability, with Jaguar clearly winning.
But Panther just blows the doors off of.., um, not sure which doors I'm talking about. Let's put it this way in terms of performance. I used xbench to measure before and after the upgrade.
10.2.8 scores
CPU: 65.14
Thread Test: 35.3
Memory: 63.7
Quartz: 66
OpenGL: 60.5
UI (aqua controls): 57.87 (18.51 refresh/sec)
10.3.0 scores
CPU: 78.87
Thread Test: 60.95
Memory: 103.96
Quartz: 102.62
OpenGL: 78.6
UI (aqua controls): 141.58 (45.54 refresh/sec)
Totals:
10.2: 57.75
10.3: 85.19
Yes, HOLY CRAP this Mac is faster! My Q3A framerate jumped 15 fps (using the Q3 G4 beta). And the UI experience is much much smoother now, really the way OS X should be. Most notably, sheets and other window animation is VERY fast, and they now properly supplement the user experience, instead of just being eye candy. The Dock still sucks, but you can finally hide apps from the Dock contextual menu.
So, if you're sitting on the fence, jump off. If you thought Macs were slow, they just got a bit faster.
Moderators should have to take a reading comprehension test.