I was able to try out and preview Mac OS X Panther 10.3 for the past few months after WWDC and for the last few days I am running a latest version. So, what to expect from Mac OS X when it comes out on the evening of October 24th? Come in and have a look in this preview article. Update: screenshots removed at request of Apple.
Installation
The installation procedure hasn’t changed, but now it requires the two first CDs and if you want extra things (e.g. X11), you will need to have ready your third CD as well. I installed clean on both my Macs, because upgrading wouldn’t work on my 12″ Powerbook (Jaguar “had errors” the installation was insisting). That was not a big deal for me as I don’t have any important data on my Macs, but it may be troublesome for people who who are trying to install on their primary machine. The default filesystem used is Journal-enabled (thank Dominic Giampaolo, filesystem god, of ex-SGI, ex-BeOS and ex-QNX fame, for that).
The Goodies
The biggest new feature on Mac OS X, according to Apple, is the new Metal-looking, multi-threaded Finder (re-written from scratch). The user now has handy shortcuts on the left side of any Finder window, shortcuts that lead to folders, other computers, media, disk images etc. You can also label files and folders according to their importance so you can easily spot them with a simple glance at the screen. Additionally, when double-clicking apps to load, a nice effect will zoom in and fade the icon’s application, giving the user a smooth launch feedback feeling.
Exposé is indeed the coolest new trick we’ve seen lately on any OS, making the usage of virtual screens less needed (however, I will still keep my handy CodeTek VirtualDesktop utility). Using the keyboard+mouse, F9-F11 keys or “hot corners”, you can trigger the OS to display your open windows in one large view. The effect is like a big bang, with each window shrinking in size and moving outward until they’re all on one plane. You can then select which one you would like to re-appear on top. It’s configurable to “expose” all windows, just applications, or just move everything out of the way for a clear view of the desktop. It would be great if Apple would add mouse gestures for Exposé though, because reaching for the F-keys all the time isn’t convenient (and I dislike hot corners). The hot corners feature can result in accidentally engaging Exposé, which can be a jarring experience.
iChat AV is a useful AIM clone and if you happen to have an iSight (as I do), it makes it even cooler and more useful, as the iSight enables the videoconferenciing feature. Picture quality with iSight is marvelous, however I would have liked iMovie to recognize the camera as Firewire DV camera (which is what it is). Personally, most of the time I use Fire instead of iChat because I also need MSN, Y! and ICQ support. I hope Apple considers adding these popular formats to iChat (if that’s possible, license-wise) as that way it will see many more “switchers” from Fire or Proteus to iChat.
Fast User Switching’ is here too and it allows you to change users without logging out of your applications (by using another cool looking QuartzExtreme-powered special effect). This is a great little feature for families or people who share the same computer. I would have prefered the option to have a small 16×16 icon on the menu bar that clicking it would drop down the list of users, instead of displaying my full name on the menu bar. Even on 1280×1024, it does not leave enough screen space for some demanding apps that span across 12-14 menu items. It’s bad enough for my name, but I imagine that someone with a full name like Alejandra Francesca Rodriguez López de Medina won’t be happy at all to see that on her 1024×768 iBook or iMac… I filed a usability bug report with Apple a few months ago about this, and the reply was “this feature is working as intended”. Right.
An updated Mail.app brings threading and will filters spam pretty efficiently. An updated Preview application renders and searches through PDFs much faster than previous versions, while the new utility named Font Book fills in a much-needed functionality hole in OS X, allowing you to organize and install/remove Fonts from the system. Another new addition is FileVault: you can secure your documents with AES-128 encryption. Though I don’t think I will personally ever need this feature, I am glad it is there. Safari is now at version 1.1 and cookies seem to work much better now. Internet Explorer 5.2 is also included, and as much as I like IE on Windows, I despise its “forgotten” Mac version. It is Safari all the way for me now, as it is indeed the fastest-scrolling/resizing (and possibly rendering) browser on the Mac platform today.
Interoperability with Windows is even better now. Samba seems to work really well. There is Exchange support, and VPN access to Windows networks is there too. On the third disk you will also find a package with support for Common Access Cards.
Interoperability with traditional Unix is also upgraded with the inclusion of XFree 4.3. I was able to run Gnome and KDE in a Mac OS X window (via Xnest — slower than the rootless X11, because Xnest doesn’t support fontconfig) or directly on the rootless X11/MacOSX shared desktop, or on a “virtual” desktop running in full screen mode on top of OSX. Good stuff, though too bad that ‘xclock’ won’t load though for some reason.
The preference panel has been re-worked a bit, the OS now has much better Bluetooth support, more printer and scanner drivers, USB 2 support, support to setup your Mac as a Remote Desktop Client, telnet/ftp/personal server abilities, print and internet connection sharing and much more, easy to setup and use via the preference panels. TextEdit can now read .doc files.
The UI has also seen a refinement. Widgets and windows are all clean-looking. I like the new tabs (they look like buttons now), I like the new tab views, the lesser trasparency in the menus, the loss of these (ugly on LCDs) horizontal lines on window backgrounds etc. If you are using a metal application and you invoke an alert or an “attached” child window on the master window, the effect of the way the child window pops up out is impressive (see it on Path Finder 3.x as well when you tell it to customize its toolbar). Overall, Apple did a wonderful job on the UI again. However, Java applications have not been updated to use the new look. They are in fact still using the same look as in MacOSX 10.1 (Jaguar 10.2 also had a UI refinement), and needless to say, they look out of place, even if Apple has the best-looking and most integrated Java apps on the planet.
Developers will feel at home with the new developer tools Apple is offering, XCode. By using clever tricks like distributed builds, zero linking, ‘fix and continue’ (an SGI innovation some years ago), code completion, fast search, predictive compilation etc. Apple is now able to offer truly competitive tools that should bring new development houses in the Mac platform and enrich it with more applications.
Other new features on OSX include a more automatic iDisk for .Mac users, better text-to-speech quality (still sub-par, though, compared to some specialized solutions I saw a few months ago), better font rendering, updated Address Book with new features, updated iSync and iCal and many more changes under the hood. Oh, I should not forget that the mouse acceleration and speed has been worked out and now we get much faster motion by the input devices. Personally, I would upgrade for just that feature alone as it has given me grief in the past.
A feature I saw on the latest betas, is the Bug Reporter, similar to Microsoft’s, KDE’s and Gnome’s Bug Buddy. When you get an application crashing, the debug symbols will load and you have the option to send it to Apple. Personally, I love this feature, no matter what OS I run. The developers need to know what’s causing problems, so I am all for co-operating with these tools. However, I saw absolutely no Privacy Policy attached to the Reporter application…
Last but not least is Panther’s speed. Users with older Mac computers (like my G4 Cube 450 Mhz) will welcome the overall new speed levels and UI responsiveness. File operations seem faster now (e.g. unarchiving, moving files from disk images to your drive etc), launch times are much better, scrolling is better too. While UI responsiveness is still not as good as in Windows XP or other OSes because of the technologies used for Cocoa/Carbon apps, the OS is fully usable and it won’t be a problem for most users. Applications that don’t use Cocoa or Carbon (e.g. X11 apps) resize and scroll extremely fast, which means that the OS’ speed is not the limitation, but the advanced techniques used on Cocoa/Carbon apps (e.g. proper non-flicker algorithms, PDF engine etc). And that’s a good thing overall. It is a give and take kind of thing: you sacrifice some UI responsiveness and you get a headache-free and good looking modern desktop.
The Not so Good
First thing I did after I installed the latest version of OSX on my Cube was to set it up as an Airport Base Station. I find the process of doing so quite convoluted. It involves 3 different preference panels plus 1 application found on /Applications (“Internet Connect”) and so you need to play around quite a lot until you figure out how to do it. At least, it doesn’t require you to mess with the command line.
Another personal gripe I have is that I can’t change the color of the Dock and I can’t place apps beneath it without resorting to hacks (on my 12″ Powerbook I want to have my Fire window underneath the Dock, as shown on my 10.2 Jaguar desktop. I always place the Dock on the sides, because most monitors are 4:3 or 16:9, which means that they are much wider horizontally, so this way I save screen space).
I would normally jump for joy at the new ability to apply AppleScripts to Finder’s files and folders via the Action menu. It is a similar concept to BeOS’ Tracker addons and Gnome’s Nautilus scripts (not a coincidence, as both were implemented by Pavel Cisler, who is now working for Apple’s Finder). However, I just can’t figure out how to use them. I enabled the “Actions”, I added some scripts in there, I right click and I only see options how to edit and remove these scripts and not how to APPLY them to the selected files/folder. Plus, my changes seem to only work for the specified selected folder or file and not across the board. I found this extremely frustrating, and I believe it is the one single new feature where Apple needs to refine the usability on how to set it up and use it. Until I can get this working, I have disabled Applescripts on my Finder.
And speaking about the Finder, it still has some bugs. Choosing “Clean Up” from the menu, it will mess up my icons and place them on top of each other on certain situations instead of actually… cleaning them up.
As I stated above, I love Safari. It is simple, cute, fast, does the job. However, I personally need two specific features:
1. CNTRL+Z (command+z) to undo a mistake that I might have done while typing fast on a textarea (it happens all the time when I am typing a post on OSNews or on Hotmail) and poof, all my text is gone inside that textarea, possibly by a shortcut I typed without me wanting to do so. I lose my whole text and there is no way to get it back, so an Undo or CNTRL+Z inside the textarea is most wanted.
2. I need a Windows Media Player plugin. Apple is touting Windows interoperability, but this is a sore spot right there. I usually need to view WMV video and movie trailers that happen to not be available as QuickTime or Real, but most of the time I wanna watch music video clips at launch.yahoo.com. I mean, I’ve got the Internet bandwidth, why not be able to enjoy Red Hot Chilli Peppers or Linkin Park videos as the average Windows user can at 300 kbps? 😛
One of the biggest differences between Windows and Mac OS X, in my opinion, is that Microsoft always tries to retain as much compatibility with previous versions as possible while Apple doesn’t. I noticed that with Jaguar and I noticed the same with Panther: about 10-20% of the third party applications just won’t load anymore, or they will crash on load. I understand that this policy has dsitinct advantages, but that’s a lot of incompatable apps (out of 7,000 available for OSX) and while most of these will be recompiled in the next few months by their authors, the inconvienience caused is already there.
Oh, and boo-hoo, my favorite background image on Jaguar (a blue-ish image with little fading rectangles) is apparently not included in 10.3.
I had no problems with stability (except a ‘Grab.app’ crash while taking these screenshots), but OSNews Publisher David Adams has had a hard crash about every three days while using Panther (7B85), caused by interactions with various applications.
Conclusion
To put a long story short, I love Panther. It has a few problems as I outlined above, but overall, this is a great update. It is a worthy operating system, easy to use, easy to set up, easy to get pleased by it. It just works. In my opinion, the only true desktop alternative to Windows is Mac OS X today, not Linux (not yet at least).
I highly recommend every Mac user to upgrade to Panther and I also recommend PC OSNews power users with some extra cash to spare consider buying either the juicy new 12″ 1 GHz Powerbook (from $1599) or the older G4 1.25 GHz PowerMac (from $1299) which do come in very favorable prices (for Apple machines) for the amount of features they carry (in comparison to other Apple machines).
I wouldn’t mind seeing an upgrade plan though. Users who have purchased Jaguar just last year, they should not be forced to pay the whole retail amount of $129 but an upgrade plan of about $50-60 bucks should be offered to them.
Installation: 10/10
Hardware Support: 8.5/10
Ease of use: 9/10
Features: 8.5/10
Credibility: 9/10 (stability, bugs, security)
Speed: 7.5/10 (throughput, UI responsiveness, latency)
Overall: 8.75
Related reading: Mac OS X Jaguar 10.2 review last year.
just got ./ed eh
Did Apple fix the behavior of the “Connect to Server” feature WRT FTP? Currently, you can connect to an FTP server just fine, have it appear on your desktop, and all that wonderfulness, but it’s mounted as a read-only volume regardless of the permissions on the remote machine. If you want to upload anything, you have to either use the command line FTP client or use something like Transmit.
<Another thing that I just noticed that it has only two button of scrollbar in the bottom. I personal would rather to have it both at the top and bottom. Did this changed in the new MacOS X or it’s always that way? I had to ask, because I never own any Apple product. >
U can chose if U want them together or separate…that choise existed on Jaguar too
Re your request for a Control-Z keyboard shortcut; keep in mind that it would be Command-Z on a Mac. Macs have Control keys, but have never used them for keyboard shortcuts; that is a Windows phenomenon. However, the command would otherwise work the same way. This is just a nitpick more than anything else.
As for the Windows Media Player plugin, Microsoft makes one for the Mac. However, it is an ActiveX control, and therefore it only works in IE/Mac. Yes, IE/Mac can use ActiveX controls, but they have to be specifically written for the Mac; I suspect that the WiMP/Mac plugin is probably the only such ActiveX control in existence. Because IE/Mac can also use the standard Netscape plugin architecture used by all other browsers, most people writing Mac browser plugins write only in that architecture, thus covering all Mac browsers which use plugins at all.
Will Microsoft rewrite the WiMP/Mac plugin using this standard architecture? That’s unclear. Given that IE/Mac has been discontinued, there are no browsers left on Mac which can use the old technology, so it’s at least theoretically possible. It’s known that they intend to bring WiMP 9 to the Mac, so they may choose to port the plugin as well.
I don’t like the look and feel of the new tabs. The old ones showed, my opinion, more what you were doing or which tab was actually open.
For the speed: I was really impressed by the improvements to this point (using panther 7b85). And it feels much faster on my G4 466 than XP on my girlfriends new 1,25Ghz PC.
* new does not mean “top notch”
How did the author obtain her copy of Panther? It’s not out yet. If she’s got a developer’s seed, surely she is in flagrant violation of her NDA by posting this “review” of an unreleased product.
Nice review Ohenya.
I have a 500 Dulie running 9.1 and would like to upgrade to Panther. My biggest concern is the speed of my older machine. If it works well with your 450 cube, than I should be ok.
How can you call a human being a ‘god’ ?
That human being defacates, sleeps etc. etc.
Mortality and divinity are mutually exclusive.
Ctrl-Z?!?
What planet is this guy from? He will be waiting a long time before Mac OS uses that for Undo.
Try Cmd-Z!
hello,
is there actually a way to diable AA inside of MaxOSX?? I tried a ibook some weeks ago – but all the fonts where toooo blurry fo my eyes -> so i like non AA at all -> the sreenshot of mozilla inside of the X11-window was the way I like (the fonts of the safari-screenshot was too blurry for me)
Is there a way to completly diaable AA (while using a special font for display-rendering like Adobes Times, helvetica and courier)?
Thanks!
Eugenia,
I wish you had spent a little time with File Vault. I’m curious as to whether or not using this feature slows anything down considerably, as it’s supposed to be “on-the-fly” encryption.
Anybody know more about File Vault?
I’ve fun FileVault a bit on my 12″ PB, and didn’t notice any performance impact, though I was only using typical documents, not editing video or anything. 🙂
Eugenia… use less screenshots in the future please, they make me drool too much on my keyboard… And when reading your review I started banging my head against my monitor as a punishment, for beeing so foolish as to spend more than 4000 guilders in 1.5 years on my x86 machine… And that’s just the hardware I’m talking about…
I’m gonna get me a Mac, anyway I can…!
I’m willing to even sell my album collection– no that’s out of the question… Or…? 
I have no problem putting windows and apps under the dock on my machine, with 10.3 What gives?
How did the author obtain her copy of Panther? It’s not out yet. If she’s got a developer’s seed, surely she is in flagrant violation of her NDA by posting this “review” of an unreleased product.
Well, what she could have done, like most reviewers do is contact Apple directly and asked whether she could get an early copy for a review.
According to your logic, every “sneak preview” and “behind the scenes” report should get the heck sued out of them.
With the new version Finder, is it possible to change how the sort order when using the multi column view?
Folder action scripts, aren’t really comparable to the Gnome Nautilus scripts (or the beos scripts I presume). A folder action script, is a script that implements a method (or methods), that are called if you do an action with the folder.
I have for example a script attached to my movie folder. Whenever I move a divx to my movies folder, it reads the filename, it reads the comment field, and it adds it to my mysql database.
If you want to run a script on a selected folder/file, you have to use the script menu. But I agree with you that Apple should have added the option to add scripts to the (context) menu, at a folder to folder or a system wide basis.
Windows Media Player 9 was demoed at WWDC. One of the main features of Windows Media Player 9 was the plugin support. (They were playing a movie in Safari) I don’t know when it will be released, they said fall, so it should be coming pretty soon. Maybe when Panther is actually released.
Just for the record, iSight is *not* a FireWire DV camera. It is a FireWire camera that records YUV; it does not compress and send signals in the DV codec (would require way more horsepower) and that’s why iMovie doesn’t recognize it.
I have no problem putting windows and apps under the dock on my machine, with 10.3 What gives?
Hmm, I tested it on panther v85, and the problem seems limited to Fire. Safari, Finder, had no problems. If you move fire to the edge of the screen, it snaps back. If you move it over the edge, it doesn’t
I liked this review but I don’t agree with a few comments. Since people have touched upon other omissions, let me concentrate on the factual error.
You state that 10-20% of the apps will not work. This is simply NOT true! Apple has not changed any of the APIs!
Apps that do not work are HACKS! Apps that have reverse engineered Apple’s INTERNAL APIs which were not meant for public. This is certainly the case for apps that use Apple’s menu item system instead of using the public one. Also, apps that HACK Safari etc will not work since the function entry points have changed.
ALL of the apps that use PUBLIC AND SUPPORTED APIs work just fine!
“ALL of the apps that use PUBLIC AND SUPPORTED APIs work just fine!”
You can’t say that, you don’t know what they’ve changed internally, while they might not have “meant” to break anything, it’s entirley possible that things have gotten broken, so until people have been running it for an extended amount of time, and try out all there apps, you can’t just blindly say “nothing is broken”.
Eugenia, you really need to learn how to take screenshots in OSX… stop using the Grab app, you can take a screenshot using command-shift-3 all at once, it will save it on your desktop.
command-shift-4 will let you select an area and then take a screenshot. command-shift-4 then hit space will let you take a screenshot of a window.
-justin
1. AppleScript is a very cool scripting language for Mac OS (Classic9 and X) and it has been around for many versions. Mac OS has an OSA (Open Script Architecture) which make it really ease for applications to become scriptable, whether using AppleScript or other scripting languages (e.g.: Frontier).
2. Folder Actions have been around in Mac OS long before BeOS, Mac OS X. It’s not an imported idea, it’s actually another Apple idea that’s has migrated to other OS’s.
3. Folder Actions allow you to assign a script to a folder. Folder Actions don’t really do much more than this. It’s the script that does all the work, by defining triggers (like ‘on modify folder’ or ‘on adding item’). So, to see it work you must assign a script (the action) to a folder. The main objective of Folder Actions is to make a folder “aware” of certain actions so it triggers a sequence of commands (defined in a script).
4. Bearing in mind the whole Folder Action concept described above, assigning the same Folder Action to multiple folders would be useless and actually buggy.
5. Finally, Panther is compatible with a lot more than 80% of installed apps. on my sistem, only NetBarrier seemed to hard crash the OS at startup. Anyway, it’s very robust and very fast.
By the way, great article 🙂
Alexandre
[email protected]
You should blame MS for not having a Windows Media Plugin, not Apple. Also, if you have Windows Media Player on your mac, Safari will usually tell you, that there isn’t a plugin installed, wwould you like to open the application and playback the file (something to that effect).
You can’t say that, you don’t know what they’ve changed internally, while they might not have “meant” to break anything, it’s entirley possible that things have gotten broken, so until people have been running it for an extended amount of time, and try out all there apps, you can’t just blindly say “nothing is broken”.
This is certainly true. But, I’m yet to find one app that breaks because of the internal handling. If you know of such error, please report it to Apple.
Eugenia, could you give us a list or a sampling of these 10-20% of the apps that don’t work under Panther?
As for compatibility the only major application I know of that won’t be compatible with Panther when it ships is VirtualPC and guess who owns that application?!? You are so VERY wrong about Macintosh compatibility through upgrades as opposed to that in the Windows world. I can run apps (even games) from the mid-80’s on my brand new G4 running OS X (& Classic). This is not the case in the Windows world. Try to run a Windows 3.1 app in Windows XP. Good Luck! Sure you can run your favorite DOS programs….hahaha!
Correction! VirtualPC runs just fine on Panther! I’m running it right now. VirtualPC is not compatible with G5 regardless of the OS. This is because the lack of endian switching support of the PPC970.
I’d still like to know which apps, that use published APIs, don’t work under Panther and work under Jaguar for example.
“Microsoft always tries to retain as much compatibility with previous versions as possible while Apple doesn’t.”
Except with Word, PowerPoint and Visio….{from personal experience}
“I noticed that with Jaguar and I noticed the same with Panther: about 10-20% of the third party applications just won’t load anymore, or they will crash on load.”
Could you name a few? I have been testing Panther on my applications, and haven’t noticed any difficulty. I would be extremely interested in learning what might be causing this…so I can avoid it. (without knowing more, I’m guessing that those apps were using some of the unpublished/private APIs that got removed in Panther).
Eugenia, if you’re looking to play new Windows Media files on OS X, try Mplayer. I haven’t used it on OS X before, but on Linux I’ve rarely run into a file that it can’t play.
Why not just use the mouse button options Apple already inclcluded? Try actually looking at the pref pane before you complain about a lack of features that are already there. And if you actually mean mouse gestures, wake up, only you and 3 slashdotters actually use them.
> And if you actually mean mouse gestures, wake up, only you and 3 slashdotters actually use them.
Then I’m one of the three >:)
Thanks for the review; it’s the first comprehensive look at Panther I have read.
Of course I am curious whether Apple has fixed my favourite OS X irritation yet: does the Open Files dialog box show the contents of the desktop on the actual desktop, as it used to in OS 9, or are all of the desktop items that aren’t disks still split off into a “desktop” folder buried somewhere in the folder hierarchy?
Also, about this new Finder design – in previous versions of OS X, it has been possible to turn off all the new widgety stuff and continue using the Finder in its classic mode. Is this still possible in Jaguar, or are you forced to use the new metal windows?
Thank you.
Semi-offtopic…
iTunes Music Store now for Windows…Lots of yummy features for those of you that can’t (won’t) switch. Exactly the same as the Mac version, including the sharing to three computers using Rendezvous. Oh yes, it’s gorgeous. Probably the best Windows app ever made.
Steve (Jobs) actually had to do something he’s never done before: give a demo on a PC. Three cheers for Apple!
I’ve read somewhere that Panther’s Internet Connect will act as a VPN client with L2TP/IPSec compared to Jaguar’s only doing PPTP. Anyone given it a try?
Hello!
Thank you for an excellent review. One question:
What build was tested? v85 or some other?
>elinida eisai vre?
nai
>ti kaneis ? ola kalaaa?
do3a ton theo
> what is your take, in an overall sense, of Aqua vs. brushed metal? Is Apple slowly completely getting rid of Aqua??
Possibly. I am growing fond of the Metal UI, however, it is a bit too dark.
> keep in mind that it would be Command-Z on a Mac
Of course I know that. But regardless, it does not work.
>surely she is in flagrant violation of her NDA by posting this “review” of an unreleased product.
As you can see this is a *Preview*, and what to EXPECT from OSX 10.3. OReilly and others have _already_ posted their similar articles, just none as in depth. I tend to write [p]reviews, not press releases.
>Eugenia, if you’re looking to play new Windows Media files on OS X, try Mplayer
Sorry, but I need it as a browser plugin. I need it for launch.yahoo.com
Gestures? get this: http://www.bitart.com/CocoaGestures.html
I’ll love to try and/or switch to OSX, but I just cannot justify the price of the hardware. I’m sorry, but US$1500+ for a laptop with a 12″ screen is just too much.
If the miracle ever happens and Apple either decides to allow clones or make a x86 version, then I’ll jum in a nanosecond.
Until then, is XP and Linux for me.
<quote>That was not a big deal for me as I don’t have any important data on my Macs, but it may be troublesome for people who who are trying to install on their primary machine.</quote>
Why would you have to loose all your data with clean install? This is what I usually do (bad experience in Windows taught me that): I got my iBook 12″ 900MHz with Mac OS X 10.2.4 preinstalled on 40GB disk drive with single partition. After playing around for a few days just to get the feeling about the system (this is my first Mac ever, I had occasional experience of using pre-Mac OS X systems, but no Mac OS X, but I have some experience with Unix/Linux, which was helpful), I booted from Mac OS X install CD, run Disk Utility from there, delete the only partition, and made two partitions: the one named Jaguar for the system, and another one named Users, for the data for all the users (well, just me for now). Then I clean installed the OS on the Jaguar partition and after that was done, I got two “disks” mounted: Jaguar partition mounted in the root directory /, which contained the whole OS, and Users partition mounted in /Volumes/Users. Then, I logged as root (actually you don’t have to, but I prefer that way), copied all the content of the /Users directory (made during install process) on Jaguar partition to Users partition, deleted /Users directory from Jaguar partition and from the Terminal.app made a symbolic link in root directory / named Users:
>cd /
>ln -s /Volumes/Users Users
Now I got /Users directory, which is actually a link to another partition. Logged out, logged in as milke, and I was done.
After several days, I wanted to assure myself that this works, so I booted from install CD, from disk utility formated the system (Jaguar) partition and did clean install once again. The whole process of making symbolic link must be repeated, but after I did it and logged as milke, I got my sistem back with all the preferences (because they are kept in my home directory on Users partition). Even the icons on the dock representing yet uninstalled apps (destroyed during format and install process) were there, represented by stylish question marks. You don’t even have to throw them away, install the apps and put them back on doc, just install the apps, log out and back in, and the icons representing apps are back in all their beauty. Launch them, and they wake up just as you leave them the last time (window position and size, colours and other preferences are retained).
Now, I know that you Eugenia know this for sure, I just wonder why don’t you use this approach? Also, this might be helpful for the Mac users coming from the pre-Mac OS X background, who don’t know much about the Unix-like systems, but would like to configure their systems that way.
Sorry about my English 😉
[i]I have no problem putting windows and apps under the dock on my machine, with 10.3 What gives? <I/>
Hmm, I tested it on panther v85, and the problem seems limited to Fire. Safari, Finder, had no problems. If you move fire to the edge of the screen, it snaps back. If you move it over the edge, it doesn’t
Well then the reviewer should really think a little harder about complaining about a problem related to an application, vs. the entire OS. Her point about Windows Media falls under this category too. She should pay attention to where the bugs are… most of them aren’t in the OS.
Unfortunately, since Jaguar, the shortcuts only give you PDF files, and that’s not cool. You don’t have the choice anymore. And Grab is not the solution.
I suggest a little freeware, Kunvert. It transforms your PDF in a JPG or PICT. It can automatically adjust the size of the image, destroy the original, and shut itself down once the conversion completed, and some other things. Really a little marvel.
I’ve seen numerous comments that Apple should offer an upgrade price (read: discounted from the $129 retail). But, this doesn’t really make sense, as anyone that is buying Panther is paying this upgrade price. All major point releases of the Mac OS are an upgrade and are at an upgrade. Why? Because you can’t buy a Mac without the OS already installed.
To the person who questioned the top & bottom scroll buttons vs grouped, you can choose which way you want it at System Preferences/General.
– Will XCode be on one of the 10.3 installation cds or later release ?
– Is it now stable – compared to earlier versions and ProjectBuilder ?
The review is good, but I could not find a screen shot showing the tabs that were mentioned in many of the comments. Are these tabbed windows? Many swear by tabs, but they never seemed better than other application switching methods, to me. Does anybody know when and in which OS tabbed windows first appeared? Beos? Some browser?
I made a comment on Expose’ in another topic, but I think it is more relevant in this thread:
<<<I have not seen Expose’, but it sounds like a flashier version of the tiling function, which has been around since the dinosaurs. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 had this feature. One would go to the “window” menu and click on vertical or horizontal tiling, and the child windows would arrange themselves accordingly. Then one would merely click the appropriate window button to maximize the desired window. This feature also worked with the windows of application groups. By Windows 95, the tiling feature worked with multiple applications, by right-clicking the taskbar and then clicking the appropriate menu selection.
Speaking of the taskbar, it is probably faster and easier than tiling or Expose’, from a usability standpoint. A taskbar gives constant visual and functional access to all open applications. And, since the order on the taskbar is fairly consistent, there is no reconnoitering or confusion, as encountered with tiling/Expose’ after the applications are tiled. It seems that the dynamic taskbar/dock first appeared in Windows in 1985 (see http://toastytech.com/guis/guitimeline3.html )
By the way, I don’t use a taskbar anymore… I just have a dynamic pager [virtual windows].>>>
The “clear-screen” option of Expose’ sounds slightly different than prior versions.
you can download windows media player for OS X from microsoft.
it sucks though. sometimes it won’t play back a movie at all.
you can also install mplayer through fink.
I asked Which tab is the current one? The lighter one? the darker one?
Eugenia replied:
The darker one. The screenshot does NOT have focus on the window itself, that’s why you don’t see the *blue* color on the selected tab. Mac OS X with Panther has brought a new UI feature: to completely “unfocus” widgets when the window is not on focus, not just the window manager, as all other OSes do. The new tabs do make sense UI wise, because tabs, are in effect, buttons.
What if you’re color blind? What does it look like in greyscale? Is it still recognizable and obvious? I still think there needs to be a “physical” indication of which tab is associated to the active page.
I commented:
> Isn’t it funny that Mac OS lovers have had to buy Mac OS X three times and only now will they get back the colored label feature that arrived in, I think, OS 8.
Eugenia replied:
That’s flamebaiting and unfair Jace. When you rewrite the whole file manager from scratch, there is no way you can have all features at once as before. Finder is not at all the same file manager as OS8/9 was.
That may be true, but it’s a technical person’s response and justification. This isn’t something an end user is going to think of or be as forgiving about as you will be. An end user sees Mac OS X as the upgrade path from OS9, which Apple intends. Then they see how many features they were used to that are gone. I’m not baiting at all. I’m grouchy about this fact as an end user. I’ve been very dissatisfied with OS X, while the tech world has been loving it to death because it is so pretty and it is a Unix. Sorry, but that’s just not enough for me.
Actually Jaguar’s General Preference Pane of the System Preferences utility allows each user to choose to “Place scroll arrows: (1) At top and bottom, or (2) Together.” Nice feature. Option (1) is more convenient when you’re scrolling and over scroll and want to go back a few clicks, and Option (2) allows you to do it like Windows, keeping us sane as we switch back and forth.
I know a lot of you probably use a different shell than <a href=”www.zsh.org”>Zsh, but I couldn’t help but contribute this code snipet found in my .zshrc file. (Conversion to other shells is trivial…) This automates my $DISPLAY environment variable setup when using <a href=”www.openssh.org”>SSH to remote from one UNIX box to another. Each of my boxes has the same snipet, such that when I remote-in using the newly defined ss function, the $DISPLAY variable is set automatically to the machine from whence I am running X11, causing all X client requests to be routed to the machine where I’m sitting… Quite nice, indeed!
<code>.zshrc<p>
########################################
# Function ss
# Calls ssh client with ‘-X’ parameter (if the environment variable $DISPLAY is defined), in
# addition to all parameters specified.
ss () {
if [[ ${DISPLAY} = ” ]]; then
ssh $@
else
ssh -X $@
fi
}
# Show our DISPLAY environment variable upon execution of zsh
print — ‘$DISPLAY is “‘${DISPLAY}'”.’
</code>
(See SSH man page for details.)
Your review is fair and balanced, but you mention two things that may or may not exist in the final release: first, you had some crashes. But you’re using a beta (which you may not have legally, BTW; if you do have it legally you’re in violation of Apple’s NDA) and these crashes may not remain in the final release. Second, you say “10-20%” of your third-party apps don’t work? Geez, that’s a lot – how about real numbers: is that, what, 2 of your 10 third-party apps? Don’t forget that there are/will be updates to these apps available, so you shouldn’t blame Panther for that.
The article is marked as PREVIEW, not a review. that’s what a preview means.
btw did you notice that there’s nowhere mentioned “MacOS X 10.3” on the apple site? everywhere it says “MacOS X Panther”.. seems like apple wants to get rid of classic version numbers.
All of your comments are marked “Already reviewed” in this and other article comments threads. Is this simply a function of you being the editor of the site, or is someone clicking ‘Report abuse’ on all of your comments?
I always kind of wondered what those “coupons” were inside the Jaguar box. I “assumed” an upgrade path, but sadly not..
For Windows Media under OS X, or any other major OS, use Mplayer. MPlayer for OSX is easy to get and install and supports every format under the sun, except FLAC (for some reason).
If MM is upset at $1500+ for a 12″ what about $2500 for a fully loaded 10″ — Sony TR3A? Or similar price for Dell’s loaded ultra-lites? I’ll take the 12″ Powerbook anyday.
Honestly.
Troy