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Ars Technica Posts Panther Review
Nexum writes "Today Ars released their latest Mac OS X review, this time for Max OS X 10.3 Panther. It's great to see another tour de force from the Ars guys. They have, as usual, an excellent insight into the new OS release, and they also cover that burning question 'is it worth $129?,' and Panther seems to come out rather well. Certainly worth a read."
An observation I made when reading this is that Mac really is the system I'll use for our upcoming DooM3 Project, because it just seems much smarter to develop graphics and games on a Mac, and Panther seems like a really nice OS that no only will handle what I want to do (with cinematics, textures, sound and code), but it also seems like it'll be a solution for cross-platform testing, with the X11 and Windows support. Unless I'm mistaken, Mac now seems to be the system for development, more than ever, and that spells progress in the right direction for developers everywhere.
A comment about Fast User Switching (FUS), from the article, kinda made me think about how the author used different applications to make sure his prefs didn't get changed by his spouse. This seems good in some ways, but in others it means less programs will be in use, while the most effective programs will be staple. For example, I used Pegasus while my wife was using Outlook. With my Mac, we'll both use the same mail prog, whatever it is. Does this cut down on variety? Does it cut down on experimentation? I think so.
Frankly I think it's worth it. I almost see it as a "montly" subscription to using an OS. It came with the Mac and every year you shell out $129 to keep using the latest and greatest version. Mac OS is steadily improving and improvment costs money. I almost feel like it's payment for a MMORPG where new content is release all the time in the form of patches and free additional features.
Google Toolbar is SPYWARE!
His ideas about the Finder and filesystem are pretty dead on. I wish Apple would bring him on board.
At the very least they could shamelessly steal his ideas. They're there for the taking.
Expose is nice. Good eye candy. Fast user switching works pretty good. But the real bottom line is the speed. Let's face it, the real drawback of X has always been it was just dog slow. Just booting back into 9 was a reminder of how slow X was. Panther is faster on my daughters G3 ibook, my dual G4 and tibook. Is it worth a 130 bucks? Yes. With the cevat: Only if I didn't have to pay a hundred and thirty bucks last year.
Pretty good review all in all. Not sure I completely agree with his finding on the finder. But I do agree that Apple seems to be fumbling around looking for something that clicks on the desktop.
This seems to me like Microsofts strategy. It's another year, get another 'major release' out of the door so we can get everyone to chip in another hundred dollars.
Hey but as long as you pay Apple befor Microsoft
*DrugCheese rants*
Expose is certainly frickin' cool. I don't know if the upgrade's worth $129, but since I got my copy for $20, it's a steal. All the various bugfixes and whatnot are certainly nice as well.
Apple's managed to get back to the lead of the desktop os pack. The question is, where do we go from here?
Filesystem metadata is a must, but give 'em another version or two. After that, I really don't know. Any ideas?
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 think Apple are somewhere between a rock and a hard place here - they have to have an evolving sexy OS, to maintain their position in the "consciousness" (God, I sound like a marketing man!) of its' users. They also have to pay for it to be developed, and (since it's a part of their unique-selling-point) can't just open-source it. So, they've got an expensive 'cost-of-doing-business', without the resources of OS to fall back on. I don't see what else they can do but charge...
:-)
Frankly, it looks like it'll be worth it anyway. One nice (for the users) thing is that Apple will need to listen to them if the OS is a profit-centre. This might explain their "two-fingers" approach to the industry complaints over "Rip, Mix, Burn"... Apple know which side their bread is buttered
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Anyway, more important to my mind than "Panther r0x0rs/sux0rs!" is this: what's up with Apple's quality control? They've had quite a few releases lately that have completely screwed their users. They've been on the order of the iTunes installer issue a few years ago, which at least had the excuse that they were new to Unix. When I pay them large amounts of money, I expect something that at a minimum doesn't break my system.
(As opposed to, say, apt-get upgrading Yellow Dog from 3.0 to 3.1. That I *do* expect to potentially break my system but I can try it for free and send them money when it works.)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
It's backward compatible with everything, I think. It also seems to boot slightly faster. But you might find the memory management to be the most noticable aspect.
Basically, lots of little updates that add up.
Okay. I'll post it this round...
Apple doesn't make money selling software. They make money selling hardware. They don't want you paying $130 for their software.. that's just a little bonus. They want you dropping $2,000 on a new Apple computer. That's where their money comes from.
If they ported it, they'd lose their primary revenue stream.
Got it?
Why should Apple port OS-X to i386, or any other platform? Apple is a hardware company that makes their software to facilitate the purchase and use of their hardware. They have nothing to gain from porting to another platform, especially one as open and varied as the i386 platform, except the mother of all support headaches.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Most changes are under-the-hood stuff and changes to the user interface, who admittedly may not seem as impressing as new applications and massive feature-additions. Still, these are the things that improves the experience every day and in almost all kind of work on the machine.
And the main thing for me is that now i would be sorry to go back to jaguar, and that almost justifies the nasty price tag (+the company pays!).
One feature that i really miss, though: support for exchange-servers from iCal. Its driving me nuts. And it makes it really hard to justify the use of macs in my department, when everybody else in da houze is using winboxes and outlook - and constantly complaining about me and my close colleagues not using the calendar.
Giving up temporarily, I cruise over to /. to see what's new. Of course, what do I find? The OSX review on Ars at the top of the list.
While I've definitely witnessed the slashdot effect trying to follow links from articles, this is definitely the first time that I've ever been caught in the middle of one.
It's kind of crazy, I didn't think people actually read the articles around here...
Wow. Astounding.
Your check is in the mail.
Love Always,
Bill G.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
A friend of mine was raving about expose the other day, saying it was the next big thing in UI design, but can anyone explain to me how it's any better than pressing F11 in WindowMaker, to get the Window List? I know it can do the "minimize all open windows" thing too, but that can already be done in X anyway.
I'm not knocking it (too much), I'm sure it looks very pretty, but I just can't see it as being that much of a breakthrough.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
It won't happen. Apple doesn't make money from software development. They make money from selling the hardware that their software runs on. It's pretty much that simple.
If you want the cool OS, iWhatever, etc., buy our slightly expensive, but worth every cent, hardware.
Why even ask for an x86 port? If you want the OS, there isn't anything very bad about Apple's hardware. I could see you asking for a port to x86 if x86 hardware was vastly superior, but it aint.
I've heard this a million times, and I've disagreed with it a million times. I'm a hobbyist, and want to build my own system rather than pay the premium for a retail system. I'd also like to avoid the scourge that is Microsoft. I've run Linux on the desktop, and while it's decent, it's nowhere near as slick and seamless as Macs. I'd love to run it, but I can't build my own Mac. So, it's rock and hard place. Microsoft seems to have done ok financially, despite giving up the inherent revenue stream of proprietary hardware. I'll wait patiently til it happens, but it's what I'd love to see.
;)
Oh, and it has to come with "Duke Nukem Forever" preinstalled
RW
Doom3 is cross-platform.
The game that the sick fuckhead in the parent post is writing (did anyone follow his link?) is thus a cross-platform game.
Therefore he can develop it on whatever system he likes.
What is a good "gaming platform" is irrelivant in this case. In fact, what is a "good" gaming platform is *always* irrelivant: games are developed for Windows, or they are developed crossplatform. Period. This is for economic reasons, not technological reasons.
What is important here is what is a good development platform. And as the parent post points out, Mac OS X is an excellent development platform. Therefore it is what he is using.
Thanks again, slashdot! Between be clicking the "reply" button and actually getting that reply written and posted, three other people said the same thing, and ended up right above me. Now I'm probably going to be -1 Redundant too! Hurrah!
You win again, gravity!
I'm running Panther on both my G4 PowerBook and my Dual proc G5.
It's certainly nice. But is it better than Jaguar ? To be honest, not that I notice. Expose is kind of nice - but despite everyone else's raving about it I just can't get excited about it. Very pretty and clever eye-candy to be sure, but the only feature of it I use *at all* is the "clear everything and show me the desktop" f11 function.
People get excited about the coloured labels. Huh? Can't say I have - and I haven't used them at all and I can't see myself using it.
Now one thing I do like is the updated Finder. Do I think it's any faster ? Nope. Although it doesn't suffer from spinny-beach-ball-syndrome at all, which is nice. But then i'd call that a bug fix. The thing I do like about Finder is the list of places to go (Home, Applications, etc) that now appeat in their own panel. Although I am still getting used to it, I like that.
I do use the encrypted home directory on my PB and that makes me feel a bit happier (I can now carry those Confidential and Restricted documents on my laptop ;-)
The Journalling file system was a no brainer and I feel very smug :-)
So overall am I happy with what I got for my 114 (one full copy for 99 and another for 15) ? Yes actually I am - doubly so when I see spot the internet machine at work (secure site, so no-one's "work" machine can be connected direct to the 'net) getting clogged with spyware and crashing just because it's now sharing a connection over a wlan I get this warm feeling :-P
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
Besides which, I bet a part of the reason it works so well is that Apple control the hardware they build iMacs from. Unlike x86 OSes it doesn't have to put up with being run on whatever hardware the local semi-competent PC building firm happen to throw together. Now I know some x86 OSes are better than others, but it just has to be easier writing an OS where you know exactly what hardware configurations it will be used on.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
Having run KDE 2 on a Pentium 200, I can tell you for sure that Aqua is significantly more responsive :)
LordBodak's journal.
Hopefully they've gotten over the fact that it's not the OS 9 Finder.
That whining went on a little too long.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Ok that was some troll. Want more than one button? Get a logitec optical. They are better than most mice you get with PCs standard. Slow? Have you tried panther? OS X contains more open source than Darwin. Apple contributed back to the KHTML source tree after making improvements for their Safari browser and I'm sure they have been involved in the Samba 3.x project and Open Directory.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
My biggest complaint about X used to be that it's latent as hell. It just can't stand up to Linux with the preemptible kernel patches. You'd push the "Increase volume" key on the keyboard at it would lag for over a second before popping the volume icon. If you use the visualizer in iTunes and start messing around with other stuff it's choppy as hell. Basically, whatever application you are not currently using has ridiculous latency and choppiness. That particular peeve doesn't happen anymore.
The whole system seems a little more responsive, although with everything sitting on a Mach kernel I don't think MacOS X will ever achieve the low latency that Linux pulls off. Mach's cool but you pay a price.
They are also doing this thing called "prebinding" which I assume is equivalent to "prelinking" in the Linux world -- performing dynamic linking a single time and saving the intermediate results so that applications can launch faster. If you look through the installation logs for Panther you see that it includes a new dynamic linker and there are many log messages of the ilk: "Prebinding xxx application."
If you look at the process list in top or with ps you see that there are FAR fewer system processes than before. I'm not sure whether this is because they really aren't running, or if the OS is somehow hiding them (which would be very un-UNIX-like).
I don't personally give a shit about the new bells and whistles such as Expose. But the improvement to latencies and the general snappy feel are enough for me to justify a $130 price tag. The improvements are mainly under the hood but as a developer I really appreciate that (heh, and I don't even develop for Mac).
Although I agree with the conclusions taken, I thik that the real review is always made by the users. And I, as a user, find that Panther is, by far, the best OS X version of them all to date. And yes, I'm happy that the OS has evolved so well.
Personally, I still haven't really understood how connecting to servers now works and I don't really like the fact that some apps got quite unstable with the transition, but that's ok, somethings need time... I find this OS to be more usable than jaguar, with expose being, sometimes, a life-savior from the evil million windows from hell that insist in populate my desktop...
Multi-user switch is also great, and I'm even getting used to the brushed metal look if the finder (that makes it quite odd, compared to any other OSX vers. but that also happened with the transition from OS9 to X, i guess)...
Yet, the best and greatest thing is that the OS is now FAST, I mean, finally it's FAST AND SNAPPY, even on older hardware (400MHz iMac DV w/384M RAM), when compared to any other OSX version or even OS9 (with VM on, of course) and I can say that this thing alone makes the upgrade totally worth.
So, I like it, a LOT... oh and as an apple user, I don't really give a dam about having the fastest hardware on earth if I can't be PRODUCTIVE with it (sometime SOME people DO try to produce *WORK* using computers, it's not all games, code, pr0n, or hacking your system! hehehe).
What I want in a computer is that it works for me and does the thing I want easily and without any crashers or "bad moods". Mac's work for me and Panther is a very enjoyable OS, what more would I want from a computer?
If they ported it, they'd lose their primary revenue stream.
I think people are proposing they would pick up a new revenue stream (with a higher profit ratio) to make up for it.
Classic/Carbon apps that use full-screen mode and change your screen resolution worked in 10.2.x, but cause Panther's Quartz to wedge royally. If I launch StarCraft (Carbon version) on my B&W G3 or my 500 MHz iBook, I get garbage drawn on my screen, and the mouse gets restricted to a box in the upper-left corner.
You can get out of it by pushing the boot button. When the dialog pops up asking whether you want to shut down/restart/whatever, your mouse becomes free and you can use it to go to the dock and kill StarCraft. Then go back to the dialog and cancel the restart.
I have seen the same behavior from Ten Thumbs Typing (2.3 or before). The fix is apparently straightforward, because Ten Thumbs 2.4 works correctly. Time to hector Blizzard about it, I guess...
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"My non-techie friends drool over the transparency and scaling effects, even though UI research has shown that they add practically nothing to getting real work done.
Let me guess, you haven't actually ever *used* Expose, have you? Or even seen it, I'd warrant.
It's the first enhancement I've seen to an OS in the last fifteen years or so that actually *will* make significant differences to my productivity.
But hey, if KDE cuts it for you, you keep right on using it...
There are gobs of email clients for OS X for every taste... for home users, corporate users, techincal users, unix users...
I have it. It's OK.
CodeTek's Virtual Desktop is waaaay better. I simply _need_ multiple desktops to be productive. I'd like to see them both work with each other (in a sensible way).
F9 ensmallens things so you can find them
F10 tells you what has focus
F11 clears the screen But if you open something new everyting comes rushing back to the desktop! What's the point?)
ifthensoft has a thing called Hacksopse' (or something) and it enables the "blob" which lets you click something to do F9 & F10, but again, what's the point?
This
In Jaguar I could start X11 and the in the terminal do a:
... with Panther ... If u try to start KDE , you see the center KDE box come up .. then all hell breaks loose. Konqueror windows all over, and you cant click on the task bar (kicker)
... the new panther X11 is installed corectly.
$exec startkde &
AND , i would get KDE3.1 ala Fink running.
I couldnt click on icons that i saw on the screen, but the dock worked.
Also i liked the ability to log into on of the linux boxen here with ssh -X -l and do a $exec startkde & on the remote box and use this as a full screen X terminal.
Well
My tempory solution to this is simply not to start KDE either locally or when doing a remote ssh.
I think it is a conflict with Expose, but who knows.
Yes
Oh well it is really a minor bug, and im sure it will be fixed in some update.
Oh, YES! Panther is worth $129.00
Cheers
* Carthago Delenda Est *
How many slashdotters are suicidal?
Not enough, sadly.
I certainly understand the history of x86 cloning and developments. The reality is that people wanted home computers, they wanted them relatively cheaply, and they wanted to be able to share apps with friends. Windows 3.1, for all its flaws, gave them this. Win95 made it prettier. Win98 made it (slightly) more stable. Win2K made it much more stable. WinXP dumbed it down so that MS could capture even the biggest dopes (although really, I don't think it's been very successful capturing new users, just retaxing old ones).
Up to XP, Windows (and most of its apps and multimedia) was easy to copy, and ran on cheap hardware. Longhorn sounds like they're eliminating half of what made Windows so popular, its portability. I'd love to see Apple challenge them on the cheap hardware front.
Points all well taken regarding MS' attempts at ubiquity, but notice that they aren't dominating in any of their other markets.
RW
The original Mac OS and its last major update, Mac OS 9, have superficial changes, visually. As most Mac aficionados know, Mac OS 9 was a fast, strong OS.
Now, move to Mac OS X. As with the first versions of the original Mac OS, Apple spent a couple of years refining the OS, adding fundamentals while also improving speed and basic functions.
Panther is the first evolution of Mac OS X, where the updates concentrate far less on OS development and more attention on OS speed, features, and easier foundations for developers to make apps.
Mac OS X 10.3 is a great step in the right direction, especially given that Apple appears to be listening to both UNIX pro as well as graphics pro and home user alike. Enterprise users as well as home users will find a lot to use in Mac OS X. I personally want to use the improved Active Directory components to see how well I can make a Mac OS X a member of a Windows domain. THAT will show how compatible such a configuration can be to some naysayers in my workplace.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
"It's like buying a whole new Mac for only $129"
:-)
Man... When I hear that I just fall on to my knees with laughter. Worse though is that with Panther, it's basically true!
What's so bad about being lazy? What if there was a war and nobody showed up?
I am just one user here, but after upgrading from 10.2.7 several of the apps that I had working fine before Panther do not want to run any more. For example, I used to be able to hook up my Brother 1440 laser to my airport base station and print just fine. Now that is a no go. Simcity 4 used to play just fine, now it doesn't. Since upgrading, the fancy backlite on my Powerbook's keyboard works sometimes and sometimes not. As a recent convert who was sold on the idea of buying a system that is alleged to be top notch and "stable" (let alone priced near the top of the class) these little incompatibilities are starting to add up to a more and more sour tasting Apple. This combined with the fact that my new Powerbook has a loose lid, and two small dime sized washed out spots in the screen do not do much to build my trust in Apple's Hardware or Software QA.
Now comes the $129/yr upgrade scheme. One reason I decided to go with Apple was to boycott the Gates empire's idea that someday I will pay an annual fee to keep my operating system/applications running, current and supported. All that Apple is doing by implementing this upgrade a year program is repackaging the exact same Microsoft business model in different colors. They are not forcing me to upgrade through a subscription fee but rather through the idea of incompatible systems, software and user conveniences. If any of you are also planning on switching from a wintel system like I just did. I think that is great, but I would also recommend that you not rush blindly into the switch (or even an OS upgrade) thinking that all problems will be solved and you will have a seamless running system. Experience with Apple teaches me that all you really do is replace one flavor of problems and frustrations with another and that though the Apple problems have a sweeter flavor they still result in a pit in your stomach as you try to resolve the technical problems thrown at you.
It's a really good article and I have to say from my own experience that I would thoroughly recommend the upgrade. Things like fast-user-switching and expose are just completely changing the way we work at loca. Especially for the Art Director who can have his usual billion windows open and still find things I need urgently by flipping them all off screen...
Stability wise I am impressed to. The only thing broken was the fact that Apple force you to place certain applications in the Application directory (rather than sub-directories below) which seems a bit stupid...
---- The Open Source Record Label : : LOCARECORDS.COM
I don't think I will move just yet. I would like too but $$ holding me back right now. I have iBook 400 MHZ and have been stuck at 10.1.5 because I can't afford to pop the 129 bucks. My wife has a Ti G4 notebook and daughter has a iMac 350 Mhz. Both still on OS 9. I have been happily using OS X to record music with a MOTU 828 interface, remotly administer Oracle dbs at work (HP and solaris hosts) from home using VNC, ssh and rdesktop after a VPN connection is established....AND I have been publishing a skateboarding zine with digital photos using iPhoto with Photoshop and Quark running in classic mode. Plug into the network at work and print to the copier, scanner, laser printer combo to create copies of my zine. I close the iBook it sleeps. I open it it wakes up. I think I rebooted it a few weeks ago. I have a hard time justifying spending more money when I already have everything I need. (except a external 30 gig firewire drive)
I use my computer about 3,000 hours per year. Even with shipping, that makes Panther cost less than 5 cents per hour. That seems like an amazing deal to me.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
MS OS's get better, for the most part. If you're a home user 95 was better than 3.1 Hands down. 98 was better than 95. ME was better than 98 (marginally). XP Home was worlds better than ME.
in the corporate or advanced user world, nt was fine, for a while, and 2000 was a godsend. XP Pro was nifty, but not much of a 2000 upgrade, decent, worth it, but not a lot of headway. 2003 Server is good. fast, functional, and powerful.
whether you're an apple fan, linux, unix, bsd, whatever, you don't have to like MS to acknowledge that their product is improving.
...don't mean to be a maths nazi or anything, but $129 per year equates (==) to $10.75 per month.
:o)
Still, you've made a very good point, I'd never really thought about the OSX upgrades in that way before. What's $10.75 a month? A beer a week. Just put that money to one side and lo and behold next years upgrade is already paid for. Nice
I am NaN
Okay.. so last spring, I got my first mac. It was a leap of faith.. for sure. I've always been a low-level systems guy; I like linux, I don't like windows... like most here I guess.
Now, I'm a mac freak. IT's really that good.
Is it worth $129? My first reaction was one of feeling ripped off.. I mean, I just bought this not even a year ago.. shouldn't I get a cheap or even free upgrade?
Well, I bought it. I installed it. Yes, I read about a few quirks, like with firewire, and a warning about filevault.. both of which are not currently things I need.
Panther is better. It's not a quantum leap, it's not Windows 95 -vs- Windows XP, it's still OS X.. it just has some nice improvements, that I'm sure you've all heard about. More than that, it's smoother, works better.. the eyecandy is just the surface. All the unix stuff I have still works fine too.. I had zero adjustment time in getting to use panther. After the install, I just kept working.. "Oh gee, finder looks different". "Hey, Mail is better!". The odd dialog box from the keychain (which mac apps use to store perseonal information, usually passwords), stating that an application that requested access had changed.. that's it.
I've come to realize that macs are not cheap. I didn't keep using OS X, or fall for mac stuff because it was the fastest, or the cheapest.. I did it because it's provided me with a work environment like none I've ever used... and if that means paying apple a couple hundred bucks a year for them to keep churning out stuff like this, I'm all for it.
This one surpised me, and is a *great* improvement if you run X-programs:
X autolauches now.
No more opening up X, and starting a program from a terminal window, just start it from its icon like normal and X starts right up.
The only problem with that reasoning is that Apple already has a subscription service that gets about $100/year out of many Mac users. Since much of .mac functionality is part of the Mac OS interface and design now, it seems like Apple is now charging $229 a year for full functionality, almost like that other company in Redmond.
Personally, I just upgraded to Jaguar to take advantage of the fire-sale pricing, and I let my .mac subscription lapse after the "50% off" first year. Part of my decision to use Macs in the first place was because, for the longest time, the OS upgrades were free. But that ended with System 7.1... (Prior to Microsoft's IP model for DOS, it was traditional to cover OS R&D using hardware revenues, and I thought an integrated "whole widget" approach would continue to use such a model.)
Those who complain about affect & effect on
I installed Panther on my alBook and on my Cube. Using Xbench to run a series of benchmarks on the Cube before the install and after, taking the averages Panther system-wide is 21% faster*.
21% faster for an OS-upgrade. When is the last time that happened?
* The percentage speed faster was much less on the new alBook.
--- I do not moderate.
Microsoft did not give up the revenue stream of hardware, they never had it. Apple's difficulty here is do they try to maintain the hardware revenue stream if they port to Intel or do they drop it entirely. The latter option may be the only one that they could make money on but would mean a massive change in the business model of the company.
The reality for Apple is that they are making a profit with their current business model so why change?
Hey all, just wondering if anyone else is having browser problems in Panther. I had all my home pages set to my.yahoo.com. Mozilla would crash 4 times out of 5 just opening the home page. Safari, 9 times out of 10, and Internet Explorer, every time.
Whan I set my home page to www.carnageblender.com, all come up OK. Of course, if I go to my.yahoo.com from there, same crashes.
The browsers appear to be the only thing acting up, so what is the issue here? Java run time? Is there an update for the JRE I need to grab?
Finally, did anyone try the straight "Upgrade" option when installing Panther? Every place I read said to use the "Archive and Install", and it took me thre evenings to get my system back to the way it was. Would the "Upgrade" option have worked OK, or would I run into upgrade-bloat-hell later on?
What Would Sutekh Do?
No problem. BeOS was ported to Intel and now you have a choice of operating systems on your build it yourself intel box. You don't have to use Windows, you can use Be.
Oh, they went out of business? What's that? Failed business model? Microsoft threatened to kill any OEM that shipped Be?
Was that the sound of Bill Gates laughing? Or was it Jean Louis Gasse sobbing (played backwards)?
Seriously, Be proved that you can't compete with Microsoft with an OS on commodity hardware. Not when Microsoft can kill you before you ever get started just by making a phone call.
Obviously they can't kill Linux because there is no company to kill. (And that's what scares them.)
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
Let me guess, you haven't actually ever *used* Expose, have you? Or even seen it, I'd warrant.
Hmm, Expose. Nice innovation. Nevermind the fact that X has had multiple desktops for years, and most window managers have a "clean up windows" command. And again, ignore the fact that Windows has a "tile all windows" command.
Yea, Expose makes you work faster. The reality is that Expose is finally bringing a feature to the Mac OS that other people have enjoyed for many years. We just never had an ad campaign about it.
Expose. BFD.
I usually use Macs at work, but my wife bought my son a Dell with XP. It couldn't even modify a photo file. First of all the extensions are hidden so you can't see what type of file it is and you don't have access to the hard drive so you can find applications. We tried to open the photo from the editing software when we did find it, but it didn't see the file, even when it was on the desktop. I'm just glad my office manager likes Macs, otherwise I would get a job raking leaves.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
scales that go up to 1,000 pounds? Maybe now Cowboy Kneel will learn how fat he really is!
I should also mention that in E (and Windowmaker, IIRC) the desktop doesn't do anything except provide a blank spot to allow you to launch menus. So a "show the desktop" function wouldn't make much sense.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Has anyone been able to mount samba shares at all? Our Mac has had a HORRIBLE time trying to load a Samba share off our E-smith (E-smith.org - Redhat 8.0 based) Linux Machine.
It's able to view/browser files just fine, but copying them goes about as slow as a 56k modem and sometimes crashes the finder...
Yep, you've never used it, or you wouldn't be making the comparisons you are.
development.lombardi.com
You obviously haven't used Expose.
BTW, there were gobs of popular "tile all windows" add-ons for classic Mac OS in the past.
Expose is not simply a couple keys bound to "tile all windows" and "expose desktop".
As anyone ordered Panthor through Amazon.com?
It's only $106.99 there.
Why is it cheaper at Amazon?
If you do more than one thing at a time (or if you browse the web), then Panther is faster than OS 9.
OS 9 is a great OS for running Photoshop by itself, but once you have more than a few applications running, the thing becomes an unstable mess.
Browsing the web with OS 9 is painful. PAAAAINNFUL. MSIE 5 for Mac is about as bad as it gets. There is no modern version of Mozilla for OS 9. And, even if you back up to Mozilla 1.3, it's still awful because OS 9's poor thread management makes the browser crawl.
Panther is smooth sailing on anything with a G3/350 and 256 MB RAM or better.
Macs have long shelf life blah blah blah, whatever. Save a couple old macs for some of the classic games (Harry the handsome executive!!!) but retire the rest.
Anyone who posts this statement has not seen Expose. Or you are willfully ignorant.
Expose performs a vector transform on all your bitmap windows. It animates and scales them using nearest-neighbour interpolation (I'm sure Bicubic is coming in.. er, Ocelot?) and parks them in an arbitrary, non-overlapping arrangement on the screen. Do you get this?
Imagine a stack of photos on your desk hovering up 1 inch and flying out in a neat arrangement, then back again. 1 click.
Tile All Windows is a pale, pale shadow of this functionality.
One of the other perks I love about Expose is you can leave it turned 'on'... if I want to monitor a bunch of webcams, I don't have to laboriously arrange them, I click my thumb mouse button. All windows update live, including quicktimes and DVDs with virtually no lag. I could never go back.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Alt-Tab's still there (Apple-Tab), but Expose also's works as keybased (F9, F10, F11 by default, but you can change that), so you can F11, then arrow to the one you want.
Mod point free since 2001
Mac OS has always been evolutionary, yes, but 10.3 is a huge step from 10.2. Apple just uses that goofy naming scheme because they want to keep the roman numeral "X".
10.3 kernel is significantly different from 10.2. They even upped the Darwin kernel number from 6.x to 7.0 for this release. Large parts of the kernel and most of the userland has been synced up with FreeBSD 5.x. Perl has been upgraded to 5.8. Gimp-Print has been rolled in. Sendmail was replaced with Postfix. The whole OS is faster, especially the GUI. The GUI widgets have been tweaked, most of the pinstripes are gone or made more subtle. Quartz has been totally overhauled. PDF rendering (the whole GUI is displayPDF based) is more than 3x faster (try it, open a large PDF in Preview). Features like Expose are now possible. Fast user switching is now possible for other reasons. Lots of changes, both obvious and under the hood.
There's even a new developer suite included in the box!
It's not "OS 11" but it is still is a huge leap forward.
Doesn't Windows+M minimize all under XP?
Porting OS X to x86 platforms makes absolutly no sense for Apple. They make hardware. They make tons of money off of that hardware and then make software so that their hardware will continue to make them money. Porting would take away some of the value of Apples main product (ie that it runs OS X). Why would they want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Bleep
I love Panther, its greater in almost every way, except for one. I have mp3s playing constantly and when I also have mpgs playing in either quicktime, mplayer, or VLC I can get a complete freeze. Is anyone else seeing this?
Choosing the lesser of two evils is a choice for evil.
Not yet - I had seen this problem intermittently since I upgraded to Panther around November 1st, but didn't see it repeatedly from two different applications until this morning. I thought it might be hardware until I saw it on my laptop, too - my B&W G3 has had a hard life.
Would you believe someone from Blizzard has already contacted me? Solely from reading the previous post?
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
as long as you only needed to run one application at a time
The idea that you could "only run one program at a time" wouldn't sound right to any Mac user after OS 7 came out -- in, what, 1990 or something like that? For the vast majority of users "preemptive" multitasking was perfectly fine. (The difference is largely one in stability, from a desktop user's POV.)
were comfortable hand-setting memory sizes for your important programs
Someone running PageMaker or a photo editor as a serious designer maybe needed to do that. I used to support a twenty-person office in my spare time, and I was the only person around who even knew about those settings. Didn't come up much. Occasionally you'd re-set games to use more memory, for speed, but that was about it.
had the skill to sort through system extensions and control panels to find problems
Again, maybe the troubleshooting sorts needed to know about Conflict Catcher, but typical users didn't. (Frankly from my experience in support I think the whole "extension conflict" angle was much overblown. I can't recall coming across any significant problem that resulted from tussling control panels or whatever. Help lines always guessed extensions when something was mysterious. They'd have you rebuild your desktop, too. Didn't usually accomplish much.)
had no use for a command line
Ask a typical corporate W2k user how often she uses the command line.
and didn't need multiple users or serious security on your machine
I'll give you that one. Really all the W2k boxes here in corporateland don't do that either, though... Gosh, all those mysterious user-specific settings in my Windows folder don't seem all that secure...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
I agree with you on the focus-follows-mouse, and when I got the Mac, I switched my Linux boxes to click-to-focus, just to be a little consistent.
However, if you want to try multi-desktops on a Mac, take a look at CodeTek's VirtualDesktop. I love it, but I find that with Expose, I use it much less than I used to. Expose makes my 1024x768 desktop seem much bigger.
"Whatever can go wrong, will." --Finagle's Law
Nevermind the fact that X has had multiple desktops for years
And just to add to what everyone else is saying, Expose has nothing to do with multiple desktops. Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. Got them on my linux box, got them on W2k (via my Nvidia card). Never use them on either, because they're shit. They simply spread the problem over multiple desktops.
I want immediate access to all my windows so I can find the window I'm looking for, when I've got eight or ten open on-screen. single keyboard click. Expose gives me that with a single key press. Multiple desktops and tile all windows doesn't come close.
But hey, thanks for playing. Better luck next time...
You really have to have Expose set to a mouse button to get the full benefit. It is much faster for me to hit mouse4, move an inch and click than go to the keyboard and do a cmd-tab.
"Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
I dunno, but my w2k taskbar shows all my windows, and I can access any one of them with a single mouse click.
Blar.
I couldn't agree more about the functionality of expose. Most people that criticize it have never even seen it. I'd like to add that it completely changes the way you can drag and drop files. You can drag a file, activate expose, and drag it into the window you want.
Not sure how this was off-topic....but ok. Interesting how when someone defends slashdot they are modded down. That seems anti-slashdot to me.
:-( --- argh. Despair, I owe again.
> They want you dropping $2,000 on a new Apple computer. What they'd *really* like is your $3k + for a dual G5.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
Expose provides different functionality to the features you've mentioned above. Tiling and "clean up windows" functions generally permanently resize and move windows. with Expose nothing moves except what is brought to the foreground. To perform the same functionality with tiling as with Expose you'd have to tile and then resize and reposition your window of choice.
So in actuality this is not a feature that people have enjoyed for years. You can use both in a similar way, but this is more efficient for bringing things to the foreground.
Hit F9, click on desired window, desired window comes to the front. Easier to get what you want than Alt-Tab (what if I don't want to tab through a long list of apps). Faster than selecting a menu option to tile, finding the window you want to work in, resizing that window, moving that window into position.
(And yes, i used the word "Expose" a lot in there. It's easy to add accents on a mac.. option-e e)
I'm currently running a "five flavors" iMac (333 MHz processor) which is now several years old. Has anyone tried OS X vs. OS 9 on a machine of this age?
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
Unless they port it to only run on Apple-branded x86 hardware.
Apple is quite capable of building x86-based hardware, and to make the software proprietary enough that it requires the uniquely proprietary features of Apple's x86 platform so that Mac OS will only run on the machines they make.
But it would risk opening up Apple's platform to OS competition with Microsoft.
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
Seriously, Be proved that you can't compete with Microsoft with an OS on commodity hardware. Not when Microsoft can kill you before you ever get started just by making a phone call.
To be clear, I'm not disagreeing with this statement that MS is the 800 lb. gorilla through which all x86 OS competition must pass. However, to be fair, Be was working with from the absolute bottom. They had nothing but a slick OS, and few application developers beyond their own people. That, coupled with MS's illegal OEM tactics, is what killed Be.
On the other hand, Apple has a lengthy history of producing quality hardware and software. They've held a varying-sized niche in personal computing, and I'd love to see them take it to the next level. With a BSD core, we know x86 portability is considerably easier now that it's ever been. I bought an IPod, and I'm buying iTunes through Windows. I'd rather be giving all my money to Apple, but I can't see myself spending the premium for their hardware.
RW
Having multiple desktop allows you to group windows together, it's basicly a way to arrange/group windows. You don't nessesarity need acctual multiple desktops to work around this problem.
Expose shows us that there are solutions to a lot of the problems we have with current GUIs, it just takes a bit of work. Maybe the Linux community will come up with a proper alternative to mulitple desktops in the future.
And saying that Windows "tile all windows" feature is the same as Expose is a joke. "Tile all windows" can't even put you windows back the way they were when you're done. The two simply don't compare, and the only person who would even compare them would be someone who knows nothing about UI and usability.
The notion that office workers are all happily exchanging their Microsoft files with no hassles isn't playing out in my world. The lack of compatability between various versions of office (including Publisher, and all the other miscellaneous crap) is a real PITA and a major productivity drain when you have to constantly ask people to save something they just sent you in an earlier format. Bleh. In fairness, though, what happens as OpenOffice.org makes improvements to Writer, say, that necessitate changes to the .swx format? Or is there something about XML that obviates the problems we see with mixed versions of Word?
Such a shame that Slashdot doesn't preserve the accent mark...
i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
They've got something that works well for them and they aren't going to mess with it.
They've also learned the lessons of the past. When they allowed a selected few manufacturers to sell cheaper clones that ran MacOS, the experience damn near killed the company. The first thing Jobs did when he went back to Apple was kill the clones.
Don't expect to see OSX on x86 any time soon.
Aside from the already mentioned - setting the functions to extra mouse buttons, and the keyboard arrow selection - the speed benefit really comes in when you have a *lot* of open windows.
I usually have some finder windows open (not many, like 3 or 4), Mail, iTunes, some messenger app, maybe a P2P app, a Terminal window, and usually anywhere between 4 and 15 browser windows open (using Safari's "open in background" function is great. I scan through Slashdot and tell it to open all of the articles and thread lists I'm interested in. Then, while I'm reading the summaries, the first article has loaded - and by the time I'm finished with that one, most everything else has loaded. I'm only on broadband.)
Trying to command-tab through 5 or 6 apps, then command-tilde cycling through 5-10 windows is quite slow, compared to just being able to click (or keyboard) one button and then clicking again to choose my window.
It's even worse on my Windows machine at work - I hit alt-tab, and a box appears with 10 identical Internet Explorer icons (plus mail, explorer, excel, etc.) Trying to find which one of the 10 that I want, particularly when they don't always appear in a rational order, takes a lot longer than it should.
-T -T
"...let's see what they really mean..."
Yes, I am the only one person in this planet who is able to translate everything into the so-called plain language. I can see thru any ideological bias. I am absolutely objective and rational. In fact, the United Nations Security Council just called in to offer me a job settling the conflicts in Belfast, Middle-East and Africa, but I said in plain language "hell no, I have better things to do. Like posting on Slashdot".
"...[the other side] Zealots..."
Translated into plain language, anyone who has any opinion different than mine is a Zealot. Me? I am not Zealot, my opinions are fully rational. I can defend them in discussion. I am not ashamed to do it. That's why I post anonymously.
"...blah blah..."
I can translate what the other side says, but I don't listen to it and I am unable to reproduce it accurately. After all, it is just "blah blah blah". They are Zealots, remember? Of course I can translate that even without remembering what that was. Don't you trust me? I'm the bloody Translatroll here.
I love OS X and I'm never, ever going back to OS 9. That said, I do have to say that OS 9 was not all that painful, especially for average users. 99% of Mac users never had to (nor ever needed to) tweak their memory allocation. Multitasking was fine, so long as you didn't mind the foreground application sucking up most of the CPU cycles. Again, fine for the average user. But... if you're like me or the typical slashdot geek, you'll want several applications grinding away hard on the CPU at the same time... and that, on OS 9, became painful.
The average user very rarely ran into extension and control panel conflicts. But, I'll tell you what, the 30 control panels and 120 extensions that made up OS 9 was complete childs play to maintain and tweak. Most had long, descriptive names and good icons. Extension Manager would even group extensions so you knew what required what to work. Put the control panel or extension file into the proper folder and it was installed. Remove it and it was uninstalled. Obscure conflicts were very quick and easy to find and fix in OS 9. Doing the same in OS X or Windows requires sorting through thousands of files! (Or, at the very least, some futile attempts at running uninstallers). At least OS X is well documented in the BSD sense... and most of the OS code is open source for the complete guru. (Remeber when 10.3 Panther came out and people were talking about the file system tweaks... such as the auto defrag? Several folks dug into the source to see just how it worked and reported the details to their websites/blogs. Try that with Windows!)
Multiple desktops are a pain in the arse. Got them on my linux box, got them on W2k (via my Nvidia card). Never use them on either, because they're shit. They simply spread the problem over multiple desktops.
Really? If you have a bunch of windows / apps open, expose doesn't seem to scale well. I have used both, and I much prefer multiple desktops vs. expose. The difference is that you can organize things much better with multiple desktops. I have desktop 1 for web browser, desktop 2 for email, desktop 3 for work related xterms, desktop 4 for spreadsheets / wordprocessors, etc...
Benefit 1: I can drill down much faster to what I am looking for.
Benefit 2: Much easier keyboard navigation to get the window I want
Benefit 3: Apps like photoshop / gimp that really require their own desktop can have their own desktop without closing everything else down
The expose thing is certainly cool and handy when the # of windows is relatively small, but squinting at 10-15 (or more) thumbnailed windows does not seem to be ideal.
For the love of $DEITY, loose != not win!!!!!
Not sure how this was off-topic
Here's a clue:
1.) Use your mouse to scroll your browser up to the top of the page.
2.) Click on the link to the article.
3.) Read the article. Failing that, read the title of the story.
Works for me. (Though it doesn't stop me from being modded Off Topic either.)
Actually, Windows 2000 eliminated portability. (x86 and alpha only)
Windows NT 4 was supported on 4 or 5 different platforms, I think: MIPS, Alpha, PowerPC, x86.
Cheap hardware is always a factor - people don't like spending money on things they don't understand or like, it seems.
The expose thing is certainly cool and handy when the # of windows is relatively small, but squinting at 10-15 (or more) thumbnailed windows does not seem to be ideal.
I agree that in these circumstances, multiple desktops may be preferable. However, I've avoided using them in the past because I hated having to scroll across three or four desktops to find the document that I was working on.
As a result, I rarely have more than eight or nine windows open at a time, and Expose copes with these fairly effortlessly.
The thought of taking two sips of that stuff gives me the shakes. It tastes like Natural Light that's been poured through a stewbum's socks to give it extra "character". Sheesh man! How did you manage to choke that shit down? I'd have to shellack my tongue and drink a whole bottle of Pepto first.
I'll grant your main point. Keeping Mac OS X up to date could suck for a poor student. "Cheap" MS software is subsidized through many students fees. Hmmmmmm.
Apple's been offering a new OS once a year for $129 for awhile now (since OS 8 I believe), so this is not something new or sneaky. It's a fair price for a great product which you do not need.
However, if you don't want to pay somebody to keep your OS up to date, then you have to do the work yourself. Apt-get or port collections are certainly options, but I'm assuming you're either not familiar with linux or bsd, or you don't want to get muddy trying to learn more about them. They involve work(however theoretically, everything could be run via cron...). Resolving dependencies (for me) is rarely as simple and straightforward as promised. Apple makes updating very simple - especially for a unix derivative OS.
Beyond simply updating packages, KDE and GNOME don't evolve at the same pace as OS X in terms of Aqua as well as it's libraries Cocoa & Carbon. Apple pumps a lot of man hours into working with the user interface (as well as programming interfaces) and trying to constantly evolve it (expose being one visible example). They fund those man hours through your $129.
Is that important to you? No, then fire-up black-box or KDE or GNOME - you can do it using fink right on top of your 10.2.7 (or 10.2.8 rather) if you want, right alongside your Photoshop or your Excel or your Word.
Heck - if you really want to purge yourself, just boot straight to a commandline by logging in as >console and run X11 from the commandline.
But if you want to run a new application which has different requirements then what you currently have (e.g. newer hardware, newer/different OS, more memory, other software, etc.) you will make the choice whether or not this application is truly worth the additional investment of time and energy.
And all that has nothing to do with your hardware problems. If you've got hardware issues, you're covered for 90 days - call Apple and have it taken care of. If it's past 90 days, then the question is why did you wait? Or do you think wear and tear could have contributed? Laptops are so easy to break....
The printer issue sounds weird. Try printing straight over ethernet. If that works, do a software update to make sure you have the latest airport version, then run the airport admin utility in the utilities folder in applications, configure your base station, and see if it prompts you to update itself.
Just email Aspyr about SimCity 4 - they're a great company - they won't let you hang.
Good luck....
"John Siracusa, professional nagger and user-interface-purist, attends to Panther and disects it in the usual Arstechnica manner. On 14 long, eye-cancer causing white-on-black pages (why does he never get aroused over that?) [...]" (my translation). ;-)
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Isn't it funny that Ars(e) is always being so anal about good GUI design, and their own website is white text on black background?
That pretty much destroys all credibility about their competence in good interface-design..
There are two rules for success:
1. Never tell everything you know.
Longhorn sounds like they're eliminating half of what made Windows so popular, its portability.
.NET, right?
You have heard of
"Sufferin' succotash."
Buy a Mac you Mofo! Trash all that over-evolved, but still has an ISA bus and a super crappy BIOS burried deep in the excrement and BUY A MAC!
:-)
See, no need for Apple to port OS-X
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
I like to minimize my windows to avoid clutter, but it appears Expose does not act on minimized windows, which really kills the effectiveness for me. Does anyone know of a hack that will turn this on for me?
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
I've had a few apps break in Panther, but nothing to cry over and anything major has been patched now.
However there is a known issue I'd like to point out to anyone who uses gaming sticks. CH Products equipment will not work with Panther at the moment. This mainly affects those of us who use the Flight Sim yoke and pedals but I wouldn't be surprised if other CH Products equipment or even other joysticks/wheels/gamepads are broken either. So do take note of that before you install Panther if you have any gaming sticks you might want to make sure they work ok in Panther first.
As it is, Apple is aware of the issue and has promised to fix it in their next OS release.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Don't mod me down, reply. I wasn't bad mouthing the author. Perhaps you need to read more of his mac articals?. He quite oftern critizises the finder in OS X because it isn't like the one in OS 9, which was much better IMHO (and his), for the detailed reasons he gives.
If you're using a track pad, your second, third, forth and fifth buttons are right there. Though we call them modifiers, and they're the ones labled "shift" "ctrl" "option" and the one with the funky flower and apple symbol, we call it the command key. Since the likely hood of you typing and using the mouse at the at the exact same time is almost 0, and given that the keys are within distance of the trackpad and button, it seems fairly reasonable to assume you would be able to operate it as well as you do any two button mouse.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Damn, where the hell do you live that it costs $1500 to drive to the nearest CompUSA or other Apple carrying store?
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
I came away from this extensive article with the feeling that I had not got the review I had been promised. With all that advertised hardware running and testing Panther, why mention it at all, if it doesn't come up for discussion again?
And this obsession with the Finder - if you don't like it, don't use it!
I think there are a lot of other things that could have been done here. If I want to know about all the new features in Panther, I can read an ad page at Apple. But a review is supposed to test these features, not simply mention them.
I think his point was more that he purposely didn't want panther, so he bought his mac early.
The dude shoudl go get his free upgrade now though... he won't be able to later.
Huh? I just bought XP Pro for one of my clients (I would never use it myself) and paid $139. So whats the deal?
>For the vast majority of users "preemptive" multitasking was perfectly fine ....
Yes it is, but MacOS 9 didn't have preemptive multitasking. It had cooperative multitasking, which is why one program could crash the whole OS.
Apple already released 10.3.1 last night, fixing the problem.
You might get taken more seriously if you didn't call people names too.
--Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop. - Dr. Walter Gibbs
Do a search for VNC on www.versiontracker.com. Happy now?
Might I suggest OSX VNC? The last release was September 17, 2003, so it would seem that it is currently being actively maintained. Of course, that's only the server. If you need a client, well, there's Chicken of the VNC. Last version was released January 16, 2003.
Looks like you lose here.
...but I rarely have multiple instances of the same program open, so I wouldn't need it.
Blar.
<a href="http://www.ambrosiasw.com/news/upcoming/ima<nobr>g<wbr></wbr></nobr> es/spx2_panther_expose.mov">Ambrosia's Posted Demo</a>.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
... so basically you're saying there's no money in selling operating systems and software, and Bill Gates will never be a billionaire if he doesn't do the same as Steve Jobs?
That makes a lot of sense...