Panther

Installed Panther today. It’s a bit of an anti-climax. Apple claim 150 features. It depends on what you would categorise as a feature really. I couldn’t point to 150 things around the OS and say, “hey, check this out, it’s the coolest!” In fact, there’s only really Exposé that’s worthy of that. Now there’s a feature. I’m going to have to see how it fits into my daily life really. And there we have it IMHO. Panther is not a wow OS, it’s an evolution that is going to make my working life much easier. When it comes to things that are going to save me time, the list looks better:

  • Exposé first of all, I mention it twice. It has three modes though and they’re all cool.
  • Better file dialogs system-wide.
  • Save as dialogs allow you to click an old file to overwrite! Finally! I’ve been waiting for this all along, it’s going to take a while before I remember I can do it.
  • Maximum mouse speed is much higher! Hooray!
  • Junk mail filtering is better in the new version of Mail. Only a little bit. But then only a little bit of my junk got through the old system.
  • Preview is faster than Acrobat Reader now and does haven’t have Reader’s long load time.
  • Much much faster interface all round. Windows are snappier, scrolling is faster, GUI mouse operations feel like less effort.

The new Finder I’m not sure about. It doesn’t really fit the way I use either Finder or hierarchical systems like Explorer or GMC etc. With Finder, I traditionally have a window for each folder, I know where those windows go and everything has it’s place. With Explorer I have one window with which to view everything. That window stays where I put it and that makes me happy. With the new Finder I can kind of have one window, but if I double click a desktop folder ot connect to a server, a new window opens and it’s the wrong place and it’s the wrong size. This sounds pretty anal, but that’s the way I use my file navigator.

The new mode of operation for connecting to CIFS/AFS shares looks pretty good, but I don’t really connect to network machines that much.

Other than that, there’s not a lot to report really. I get the feeling that I may well dig out more stuff over the next few days as I get back to work.