Monday, November 3, 2003

Panther Notes

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It's neither here nor there, but just as an FYI... I can shift tab through forms in Safari no problem...

I've since rebooted (due to a SPOD lockup) and Shift-Tab is working for me now.

Agreed on Exposé - I tend to hide everything I'm not using, so it's not as useful as it should be.

I'm not sure what the deal is, but now Preview is back to opening multiple images in the same window.

"The system now intercepts Command-Option-D before it gets to BBEdit" ...

... but you can change this: System Preferences / Keyboard & Mouse / Keyboard Shortcuts. Scroll down to "Dock".

This file demonstrates the differences in how Jaguar and Panther render Lucida Grande.

I'm absolutely dissapointed about Panther. Since I installed it on my iBook and my iMac DV SE, I've had 3 complete system crashes when opening too many applications at the same time. With 10.2.x I didn't have any crashes in 9 months! Also, networking in Panther is crap. Exposé is useful to me, but thats the only thing which really seems to work in Panther. Finder often crashes when searching for files. The menubar sometimes gets messed up. I.e. it sometimes doesnt hide the menulets when an application menu gets too large to display all of 'em.
Safari seems to have a huge memory leak. After having it running for like 2 days, it takes up more than 150 MB of RAM, even if I'm not using it during that time!

I'm thinking about switching back to 10.2.8, until Panther is at 10.3.5 and usable. But I'm really pissed about Apple for bringing out such a buggy system as Panther is right now.

John Stiles explains the Shift-Tab issue.

Yeah, I agree completely. Exposé is nice and I like being able to easily spellcheck in Safari, but that's about all I can say in Panther's favor. In Panther I've had programs crashing constantly and a complete system crash every other day. I also can't use my USB Gamepad because somehow it conflicts with Exposé (it disables the Function keys). It also makes Unreal Tournament 2003 incompatible with ATI video cards (until the next UT patch arrives). I'm seriously considering going back to Jaguar.

Every morning I open Software Update and pray.

I bought a G5 that shipped with Panther (the weekend it was released). I've had absolutely no problems with crashes, slowness, weirdness, freezes, or the like. It has been flawless. But then again, it was written with the G5 in mind.

If you have a G4/G3, you should probably avoid it, as its features are not not worth the cost of the upgrade and the potential problems. However, I have installed it on my daughter's G3/333 iMac with no issues as of yet. Seems to handle her Classic games better than 10.2 as well.

I suppose it isn't clear from the list what my overall opinion is: Panther is a must-have upgrade.

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