Here is a review of Mac OS X Panther 10.3, the new offering by Apple, only a few days after its release.Installation
Installation worked without any problems. The installation process was simple but still had enough options to allow me to customize it as much as I wanted. Panther comes with 4 CDs, three of which include Panther itself.
The increased number of CDs is apparently due to the inclusion of new voices for the Speech Synthesizer.The fourth installer includes XCode, additional BSD subsystem parts, and developer manuals and examples. Installing XCode (even over an existing Project Builder installation) takes around 700 megabytes with all examples included, the actual program takes around 200 megabytes to be usable.
Upon booting, the installer lets you choose the installation language and hard drive, and after agreeing to the terms of the license lets you select different packages. You can choose to install or not install the BSD subsystem, individual iApps, Printer Drivers, Fonts, System Languages, Speech Synthesizer voices and X11. After this step the actual installation starts. The installer gave an estimated installation of 44 minutes, which is about as long as the actual installation took. This is quite quick compared to the last Windows installation I performed, but the after initially displaying 44 minutes the number went down to 8 minutes and then continued to display several wrong values. The installation still works perfectly though. After CD 1 is finished my computer spit it out and asked me to insert the next one. CD 2 and 3 only took a short time to install, mostly because I was only installing X11 and the iApps due to space concerns. The computer then restarted into Panther.
First Impressions
The entire system seems faster and more polished. Icons and Programs open differently: The icons increase in size and then fade into nothing, as the program starts. New finder windows now move in from the top of the screen and option windows flip down from the top of the window. Small changes like these exist across the entire system.
Graphical effects are noticeably smoother and window resizing is smoother, though this has never been a big issue to me. Display of text and pdfs is also faster, and so are many other parts of the system.
Command-Tab is greatly improved, and though it now works similarly to Alt-Tab on windows, the effect is much more visually pleasing. It is now also possible to hit Command-Tab and then move through the applications using the arrow keys which was a feature that was really missing from the old version.
None of my existing applications broke, though I did have a few problems with some of them, but more about that later. Something that I did notice, however, is that LaunchBar moved from the right corner of the menu bar towards the left. This is because OS X automatically orders the icons in the menu bar and the hack that LaunchBar used to override this was removed. This did not cause me any significant problems though. Overall the first impression was very positive.
Exposé
The most famous feature of Panther is of course Exposé, and it is also one of the most useful. Exposé supports three functions, the first of which shrinks and moves all windows on the computer so that they are all visible at the same time. The user can then select which window to use. The second feature sorts windows by application and allows user to cycle through the different applications. Finally, the third feature moves all windows off the screen, to reveal the desktop which enables the user to see all Desktop icons. For people who usually have multiple windows open (which is very common in OS X) Exposé is extremely useful. According to fellow Mac user Albert Andersen:
Using Exposé reduces the task of getting to any window open to constant time. Normally, it is a task that is approximately O(n), where n is some combination of the number of applications open and the number of windows in each application.
This is of course not intended to be entirely serious, but it is an interesting statement of Exposé's functionality. Expose, however, still has its share of problems. On my dual display setup, Exposé is noticeably slower than when used on just one display, but it is still very much usable. The problem is of course due to the graphics card having to double the work that it usually does, and similar problems appear with transitioning background images, where the transition is not quite as smooth as on single monitor machines.
Another problem is that full display applications do not always behave correctly. Bryce 5 for instance, gets split up into multiple little windows and it is not possible to select the entire program after that. In order to combine them into one window the user has to select a different window, and then switch to Bryce without using Exposé.
- "Installation, Impressions, Expose"
- "Features, Problems, Conclusion"
