- Apple fixed the bug, introduced in Jaguar, which prevented my Mac from booting when more than 1 GB of RAM was installed.
- Overall, Panther seems much faster and more responsive. I’m not sure I’d call it fast yet, but it’s almost like a processor upgrade on G3 Macs.
- The Jaguar Finder was excruciatingly slow at deleting large numbers of files at once. I timed it and found that it took 45 minutes to move 4957 files, where the OS 9 Finder took just 57 seconds. The Panther Finder takes 84 seconds, and it shows a progress window instead of locking up the whole Finder with the SPOD.
- Preview is much better. It’s fast. It supports text selection and searching, and also PDF bookmarks and links, although there doesn’t seem to be a way to see a link’s target, like when you hold down Option in Acrobat. Keyboard navigation in the drawer is screwy. Nevertheless, the improved Preview is probably my favorite Panther feature.
- Opening multiple images with Preview once again opens them in separate windows.
- Open/Save dialogs are much improved. Type-selecting is not 100% reliable, though.
- Apple Help is good—at last.
- The Fast User Switching animation does indeed look cool, but sometimes the cube rotates in the wrong direction.
- Image Capture uses the same kind of animation.
- TextEdit (and Cocoa, in general) can read Word files.
- So far, the Finder has unexpectedly quit once, Mail twice, and Xcode three times.
- Xcode still doesn’t have a command for saving projects.
- Desktop printing is back, and the printer icon in the Dock does indeed look like my printer.
- Exposé works great, but it’s proving to be less useful than I expected, because I tend to hide whole applications, and Exposé doesn’t show their windows.
- The keyboard shortcuts in many applications have changed.
- LaunchBar refused to work until I trashed its files and had it rebuild them.
- Apple has started using a new LinkedTextField UI element. This is a combination button and text field that draws blue-underlined text. It can be seen in Activity Monitor, Mail, Disk Utility, System Preferences, and more. Let’s see some guidelines on when to use these.
- The Finder is better, but still not acceptable. Column reflowing in icon view still doesn’t work right, the icon grid has been enlarged again, and window zooming is buggy.
- Mail’s junk filter identifies spam messages, but for some reason doesn’t move them automatically, even when I check that option.
- Shift-Tab no longer works in Safari forms.
- iPhoto shows “PMPM” or “AMAM” after my photo times, instead of “PM” and “AM.”
- Address Book now stays in Edit mode when you change between cards.
- Smoothed fonts are now blacker and less fuzzy around the edges. This totally changes the way Lucida Grande looks; it seems more narrow, now. I still prefer screen fonts, though. The LCD font smoothing still has visible color artifacts, and doesn’t look as good as on Windows.
- Connected servers don’t show up on the desktop, even if I have that option enabled. Thus, I can’t figure out how to unmount AppleShare volumes.
- The font panel now has a search field.
- The new disk image mounter doesn’t seem to respect the Internet enabled flag.
- The system now intercepts Command-Option-D before it gets to BBEdit.
Apple Help Fast User Switching Mac Mac OS X 10.3 Panther
O’Reilly has posted slides from the conference. Matthew Barger’s presentation looks intriguing.
