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PC Mag Gives Panther 5-Star Rating
Cycline3 writes "The subject says it all. PC Mag gave the big black cat a five-out-of-five star rating. I really like Panther, but I never would have imagined that this would happen. Pretty cool. PC users take note!"
The poster must not be a big reader of pc mag.
PC Mag has been giving good reviews to apple products for a long time. Here is a link to a review of 10.1 (4/5 stars).
I also don't understand the surprise. What would a PC user find wrong with a mac? It's similar enough to windows to be usuable. I don't use apples because I don't like the lack of 3rd party hardware and the more limited upgradability. There is nothing wrong with the OS.
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
I am seriously thinking that there is no better os invention than Expose. NONE - not even the stinking BSD kernel... expose makes my life complete. DONE. D O N E
Malcolm X would be so proud that Panther is doing so well.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Wow! It's about time. How long have we been waiting for this!
I'm going to be really pissed if it doesn't run on my 233 MHz Pentium II though. And does it *really* need 128 megs of RAM? Can't I skate by on 64? And $129? It should be free to anyone who bought a computer in the past three years.
That's just my small percentage of an opinion.
There are two kinds of people in the world: those with loaded guns, and those who dig.
Even the GRE Analytical Writing section allows for minor grammar and spelling errors on their 6.0/6.0.
Me thinks you have an odd notion of "journalistic integrity."
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
Really, how many operating systems have you used that didn't have known problems/issues?
As expected, the reviewer points out that Expose is really, really cool. More interestingly to me, he also points out that Preview is much improved as well. I used to think it sucked, but now I've made it my default PDF viewer.
The most exciting thing about Preview, though, is that it's easy to predict that its beautiful new "Find" function will make its way into things like Safari. Seriously, "Find" is so good that it has pretty much changed the way I rifle through the dozens of PDFs of journal articles I have on my disk. Like, I can actually find what I'm looking for. :-)
Babar
I've been using Panther for a little less than a week and it's been bliss. Seriously, neither Windows XP or any Linux distro I've ever tried can touch Panther in terms of usability. It's very slick and polished, and blows even Jaguar away with lots of refinements in networking, the aqua GUI, and expose, the feature most likelt to be copied my MS when longhorn comes out.
The complainers will be the loudest of the bunch, and yes there are a few kinks. But note the firewire problem was an issue with the hardware chipset, not apple's programming. Obviously people like me, the happy ones are not going to get the headlines.
I'm *really* hoping that they figure out a way to integrate Preview's PDF-rendering abilities into Safari, so that we can finally have a decent plugin to view PDF's inside the browser on OS X! (I know, there's a couple shareware plugins out there, but those never worked well enough for me.)
Minus two glaring faults that affect only certain users, Panther looks very good. And Apple will resolve the problems, albeit tardily. But the bottom line is: when you're costing people data loss, do you deserve a 100% rating.
As for my review... I can't imagine life without it... using Preview this past weekend must have saved me and my fiancee a few hours searching through loads of PDF annual reports. -Rob
I would be happy to use OS X on intel / AMD based hardware. In many ways I like it more than Windows XP.
What I don't like is the fact that Apple is the sole manufacturer of the hardware required to run the OS. Monopolies tend to create weird pricing and reduce innovation. It still seems to be a fact that Apple hardware price/performance ratio is poor compared to intel/amd-based hardware (but let's not go deeper into that dark alley again).
And I'm really hoping that if they do, they also offer a way to tell Safari not to render PDFs inside the browser - I went through some effort to keep the Acrobat Reader plugin from working on Windows, because, for many PDFs, if it's big enough for me to read, it's too big to fit in a browser window and show the entire page, given all the browser *and* Acrobat Reader toolbars.
Don't use XP or Win 2k?
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http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=
http://www.mcpmag.com/newsletter/article.asp?Ed
Maybe we've all got ourselves wrapped up in our jargon, but last I checked PC stood for Personal Computer, not "windows-based-personal-computer". Macintosh may be a different platform, but still is a personal computer. Just because we have a cult, doesnt make it something entirely different.
--
However, something somewhat unrelated... I installed Panther on my mac at work on friday, and my co-worker approached me, and was watching the progress and he said "so when do you put in the serial #?" and i said "No serial #". And he looked at me funny, and said "How do they know you aren't giving copies to your friends?" So the only response I could get out was "i guess when the users of a product don't hate the company that makes it, the honor system works."
I hate the whole "open in browser window" thing. I would much rather have the browser download the file and pass it off to another application with its own GUI.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
It's obviously moved away from "personal computer". I just generally assume an Intel compatable computer running Microsoft Windows (some might argue that linux runs on a PC... more confusing).
Why are we letting "personal computer" become synonymous with Windows? That's certainly not good for competitors. Why does Apple say the iPod is available for Mac and PC when they really mean Mac, Windows, and anything else you can hack to work with it.
/bin/fortune | slashdotsig.sh
hmm, so for each freeze it loses a star....
man, if you'd reviewed Windows98 it'd have been a -78 stars.
I disagree. The find function is nice, but from the most exciting thing about Preview is that it now knows about bookmarks in PDFs, making it very easy to navigate large PDFs quickly. I write a lot using LaTeX (TeXShop is a very nice app for this, by the way) , and regularly deal with documents in the tens or hundreds of pages range. Being able to jump to a specific section quickly makes my life a lot easier. I've always been able to do this with Acrobat Reader, but now I can do so from preview.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The new interface functions are really just icing on the cake (not that icing is unwelcome). Panther fixes a number of restrictions facing developers and offers some new widgets. For example, 10.3 allows custom cursors larger than 16 x 16 pixels. There is a new rotary slider control, a new webview, and so on.
These are features in Panther that will only become apparent as developers release products that use them. By buying Panther you're getting more than is immediately apparent.
I have long hated Macs but as of yesterday, I now own a 15" alum Powerbook.
I absolutely love this thing and while I still am an admin on a Windows network here at work, I think I am done with Windows on my own.
I have increasing problems with Windows and having increasingly fewer reasons to hate Macs.
As of OS X 10.3 and Xcode, I now have very few reasons to dislike it.
The only few gripes that I have right now are:
1) The aluminum keyboard feels like dragging my nails on a chalkboard if my nails (esp thumb) hit the hey instead of flesh.
2) The integrated Google search doesn't have buttons that let me search directly to images and/or discussions, and when the search comes up, there aren't buttons of the words that I just searched for allowing me to search within that document.
3) Many web pages totally break using Safari - I am going to debug one page that I use all of the time and send the fixes (JavaScript) to the person that maintains it since it is sommething I use daily when analyzing stock charts (well, nightly).
4) The resolution on this laptop isn't so great - but the screen does look fantastic.
5) I'm not sure that my backlit keyboard works. It is turned on and no matter what changes I make via F9/F10, I still see no backlighting. Not a huge deal, but still a gripe.
6) I have yet to figure out where the graphical FTP client is - so far I am largely just treating this like a Linux laptop and using a lot lof command line stuff.
7) I wish Komodo 2.5 was ported to Mac OS X 10.3 - I really like the way that it deals with Perl.
8) The trackpad is not responsive - it is almost like accelaration is turned on, but I didn't see anything that would indicate that in any mouse menu.
9) The single mouse button works if you press in the center, but not if you get it off to one side - which is usually where my thumb is (perhaps out of habit).
10) I'm still getting used to the kepay layout for shortcuts - fortunately my misstrokes have yet to do anyuthing harmful.
11) The spell checking thing doesn't let you bring up a quick selection of the word/words that it suggests - innstead you have to open the full spell window and then it wants to continue on - I miss the ability in Windows to right click and the first few words on that menu were the suggested words and you could just choose one and move on.
12) The iChat thing isn't as configurable as I had hoped. I hear there is another thing out there, I will test it out in a bit.
But the things I LOVE are:
1) Its weight - this thing is so light and thin. The battery is tiny and WOW 4+ hours on a charge.
2) The wireless is fast and VERY easy to setup (no real setup, just turn it on).
4) Mail app - this thing is great. Nice looking and all the features I want. I love it.
5) Snappy! Everything is quick on it.
6) Feels very stable.
7) FreeBSD command line - nuff said there.
8) Xcode is cool.
There is a ton that I have yet to figure out yet, but I really like it so far.
I am going to try to get OpenOffice on here and Xemacs and then I think I should be all set after I try to bring over my documents from my pc laptop.
I am also going to benchmark this laptop against my other one and my stateside server to see how it performs - initially will just be running Perl scripts that I use a lot.
My previous laptop was an Athlon 4 (the mobile chip) 1G, and the server is an Athlon XP 2200+.
The laptop gets warmer than I had hoped - just to the edge of comfort, if not just over - but it doesn't melt any part of it like my pc laptop is doing now (its heatsink fan is broken - hence why I got a new laptop, will then take my time to fix that one).
Anyway - I love it - any suggestions from old pro Mac users would be highly welcome as I look for cool new things for my new shiny toy.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.