Panther Notes
- 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.
12 Comments RSS · Twitter
It's neither here nor there, but just as an FYI... I can shift tab through forms in Safari no problem...
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.
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.
