First Notes on Panther

Well, I got a copy of Panther for TenCon (AKA, the O'Reilly Mac OS X convention -- I think the guys at MacSlash coined it, and I like it, so there ya go.), and I'm kind of middling about it.

Partially because anything that causes me to go through grief makes me a little suspicious, and a few days of hacking away at an OS to find out the details of some obscure functionality is definitely not what you'd call "fun".

But, I can say this; Expose is cool, and the upgrade I did to a Carbon Copy Cloner copy of my 10.2.8 installation worked swell -- a lot better than I expected. There's a few new quirks, but no severe problems.

To give some summaries about it...

• I hate the metal, but then again, I've always hated the metal. It's not badly done, it's just not something I like.


• I like the new Finder windows. Big thumbs up to the sidebar. It's handy, as I keep things around in folders that most other people wouldn't care for.


• I like Expose. What can I say, it makes it easier. Nice job!


• I still hate the fact that I have somewhere between 50-100 applications in my Applications folder, but can't move them out for fear that they won't work.


• I like some of the system preferences, and the ability to control them by keyboard -- but hate the fact that once you hit a system preference, you can't hit another one without either going to the menu or hitting command-L. Bites the frozen prong, really.


• LOVE the right-click (or option-click, whatever) option to zip a folder. I'm enthralled by it. Whereas before, it was open the terminal, figure out the command again, zip the file, remember that I really need to tar the file first, then zip it, then send it out... now it's a right-click. Joy!


• Font book? It's been needed for a long time. It's a little wimpy right now, but it's got big, big potential. I'm rooting for it.


• Terminal has a new Connect To Server with SSH, SFTP, Telnet and FTP available via the GUI. Shift-command-K, and you get a list of connections. Nice touch...

Fun all around. I'll shoot some onto the site as I get them, just for fun.

Posted by Ted Stevko at November 4, 2003 07:59 PM | TrackBack