My Panther first Impressions and discoveries - Post here

karavite

karavite

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If indeed Apple reads these posts, thank you so much for Expose. I was a little doubtful it would be useful until I got in my hot little hands. I have two monitors and am always using multiple desktops to sort things out (CodeTek Virtual Desktop), but Expose takes care of so many of my window/app managing issues, I may not really need the multiple desktops any more, or at least as much.

Another thing - Mail now seeming to default to pasting text in the Mail specified font (vs. whatever I copied it from) is fantastic. I can't tell you how much time this alone will save me.
 
Doing an upgrade on my Powerbook G4/400, srewed erything up. Had to wipe and fresh install. Everything works fine except for the "c" key. Have to hold it down for it to work.
 
I love the fast user switching. Especially handy when you have more macs and more mac users in the same place. ::angel::

Also terminal background .. Now, will the dock background picture be in 10.4?

Post you first impressions here, guys. I will open an other stiucky one for the Panther Bugs and Incompatibilities.
 
Initial impressions:

GUI is faster, somewhere in the 20-30% range. Noticeable. Still room to grow, but I bet it's almost glass on the G5s.

Exposé is every bit as cool as I had hoped. Best GUI feature I've ever seen.

Everything just feels and looks right. It looks and reacts like a more finished OS than Jaguar.

Preview destroys Reader. It is super fast on DP 867, can't imagine how it's like on a DP G5. Reader wishes it could be Preview.

Font Book is giving me fits. Poor documentation doesn't help. Thousands of fonts bring it to its knees. Installed fonts don't always update visually, so you have to quit and relaunch FB. By default drag and drop install turns the fonts on (not a good default). And default pref is to move the source font instead of copying (also not a good default). Major headache. Should be worth it in the end, cuz it's great once the fonts are in there. If they ever get auto-activation, this thing will be unbdeatable. I have every OS X Font Manager and have used all of them. FontBook is the best (though SuitCase still seems to be the only one that shows multiple font cases at once for comparison. All font managers should do that).

Apps definitely launch faster. Apple's apps launch very fast. The big apps (Photoshop) launch about 20-30% faster. Don't know how much of that is related to clean install.

Like the new smoother look, tho I'm starting to join the anti-brushed metal bandwagon. I'll tolerate it one more round, then it's time to move on, Apple.

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"Discoveries"

I love the Finder-level archiving to zip files. Very nice touch. Goodbye Stuffit.

The Folder Actions are cool, hadn't tried them before. Still not sure I'll ever actually use them, but it's neat to have.

Alt-Tab app switching puts a nice big menu in the middle of the screen. I like that.

Selecting Finder files puts a box around them for easier visual feedback as to what is selected. Nice.

Finder windows show summary info as to that is in the window. I just wish it would add File size info as well.

Why on earth did they put Login Items as a Tab in Accounts Preferences? That was a terrible idea. Took me forever to find that.

My printers are ready to go this time, with Jaguar I had to manually install drivers for two out of three printers.
 
Thanks to the admin for re-titling this post - I came back to do something similar, but you beat me to it!

I have a few drives and though my main disk now has a clean 10.3 install, I did an experiment by running an upgrade from 10.2.8 to 10.3 and it works perfectly. Not sure if everyone will have the same luck, but it looks like Apple did its homework.

I like the new Finder window, but it is still no replacement for my beloved Fruitmenus (should be out for 10.3 very soon). Apple, why do you shy away from the old Apple menu way of doing things? If you put the side bar in the apple menu I'd be all set - no more Fruitmenus. Is it because you want to shy away from a start menu thing (which seemed ripped off from the Apple menu in the first place)? I know I can put all kinds of things in my dock and I really like the dock, but I am just stuck on having the ability to go to an Apple menu - oh well, FruitMenu seems to have this covered.

I don't know if this is related to 10.3, but my Final Cut Pro 3.2 is doing some really odd things in rendering various files. Perhaps I finally need to fork out for that v4 upgrade...
 
Font Book is DOG slow. I own the Adobe Font Folio 9.0, which contains about 1500 - 2000 fonts and tried to add them to Font Book. I can't find any preference that will let me add fonts without activating them at the time of addition, so Font Book insisted on activating all the thousands of them... which took FOREVER. I got the spinning beachball when I added them, the spinning beachball when I tried to highlight a different font, then again when I hit "deactivate." I don't think it's going to work out -- too damn slow.
 
OK, so my Font Book trouble is not just me. FB simply does not cut it for large font collections. I am so disappointed as I was looking forward to using it more than any other Panther feature (except Exposé). I have been fighting with Font Book all weekend. Many hours of waiting for fonts install only to have to wait for them to be deactivated. I figured it might be worth it in the end, but I can no longer get FB to even launch. It is so bloated or corrupted that it won't launch! Endless beachball.

What I'm trying to do now is make a compromise system, where I use FB just for working with fonts that I actually intend to use. I'm looking for a Font Viewer that will let me view uninstalled fonts. So far, The Fontz is the leader, but it doesn't properly support OpenType, so it's not perfect either. In fact, it's useless, because I simply have to have OpenType support. Man this is frustrating.

If anyone knows of a Font Preview app that supports OpenType and UNINSTALLED fonts, please advise (I'm currently going through every shareware app I can find).
 
Extensis Suitcase worked fine for me. Never had a problem with large font collections, either, and it'll let you preview fonts without activating them. You can add fonts to Extensis without automatically activating them, too, making the font addition process a hell of a lot faster.

I'm thinking of switching back to Suitcase for the time being. No, it ain't a speed demon, but it beats Font Book hands down.
 
I've used all of them, including Suitcase, which still has the best font preview comparison. I dumped Suitcase because it fell behind for a while, was a little buggy and worse, did things like put in code or something so that if you open an InDesign file that originally used Suitcase to work with fonts on a system that doesn't have Suitcase, you get a warning box and an option to purge the Suitcase data. Annoying.

I think you're right though, it may be the best option these days. I've been using Font Agent Pro for a while since they got auto-activation going, which is very flaky. It's interface is still the best (very Font Book-ish) and the searching is great, but it's slow and you can't compare multiple fonts. What are font manager developers thinking by not allowing multiple font comparison? Duh!

Are you using Suitcase X1? I'm DL-ing the demo now. Real shame FB isn't delivering the goods, I've really been wanting an OS-native manager for years.
 
Yes, I'm using Suitcase X1 and have dumped Font Book in favor of it simply because of speed. I don't want to wait four minutes while Font Book sits there and spins the beachball for who-knows-what-reason.
 
The current version of FruitMenu, v3.1, works fine with Panther.
The current version of ASM, a replacement for the Apple Menu also works fine in Panther.

That crash program, going to Apple, seems to pop up when most things crash.
 
My iMac DV/SE 500 MHz/1GB boots faster than I have ever seen with OS X on this system. roughly 2/3 of Jaguar boot, I normally sleep my system, wake-up is faster also.
I like the eject botton next to any removable devices in the SideBar.
There's a menu selection in the print window to check for printer driver updates.
You can actually repair MS-DOS disks (runs some FAT error testing in Disk Utitlity)
Mail apparently handles attachments in an understandable way (I've never seen an attachment labeled as one prior to Panther)
I like the background 'fade' on log-outs. Shutdown has a completely different sequence now (seems much like an OS 9 shutdown now, much faster)
Try toggling 'Use Smooth Scrolling' in the Appearance pane. Smooth Scrolling, for me, gives a nice smooth use of a scroll wheel mouse. My gripe about Mac compared to Windows scrolling, was that scroll wheel is 'step-py' or jerky. This option gives me what I prefer - smooth!
 
I've noticed the new shutdown as well! Shuts down MUCH faster than Jaguar did.

I also noticed that Panther spins down my internal ATA hard drives BEFORE it shuts down now -- with Jaguar, the disks would spin down and shut off when the computer shut off... now, I can hear them spinning down and "clicking" off before the computer turns off... an effect of the new journaling file system perhaps?
 
Now there's no Favorites Folder with a sub menu in the Go Menu. I liked that for keeping aliases of my networked machines for a quick connect. Now I have a folder in my Dock with these aliases in it, and right click the folder and connects are almost instant.
 
I use graphite and have noticed the widget's in the Finder do not turn graphite. The sliding bar does but the buttons do not. I don't like that.

In fact my only complaint would be the fact that the os is so un-uniform. With 2 different brushed metal's, widget's that don't match the other widget's, transperancy here, but not over there, etc... I wish they would clean it up a bit.

Other than that I am liking 10.3.
 
I hope the Help Center sucks less than the one that comes with Jag, which is slow, obscure and most of the time, utterly useless.

P. looks promising though. The Apple Expo convinced me, it's an upgrade I'll buy. When the money gets in.
 
I can confirm that the Help Center is quite a bit faster... don't know if it contains any more useful information, but it *IS* faster...
 
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