My Panther first Impressions and discoveries - Post here

Hi Everyone.

I do know of a program that will do view fonts. Thumbsplus from Cerious. Now, the only problem is I just checked their website(11/14/03) & it looks like they have pulled the only Mac version available. I use v4 on a Wintel box and it works great, not perfect but it does what everyone seems to need.

I did found Font Viewer v4.4 on Tucows which was updated on Aug 16, 2003 and it's freeware.

And by the way, Suitcase from Extensis also chokes and takes down OSX with it when I attempted to add the fonts I have. Yes I know, no one needs 4000+ fonts. :)

thanks

David



mindbend said:
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).
Click to expand...
 
Faster, cleaner, cooler, did I mention faster?

I don't really like that panel on the left of the file browsing windows, but Exposé makes up for that tenfold! Wow that's cool as heck.

I love Apple. Only Apple could make a next-generation operating system, and make it faster than previous iterations! You try putting Windows XP on a 300MHz laptop and see what happens ;)

My initial reaction to Panther: well worth the 117$ :D
 
dsatter, also consider Fontage as a previewer. Only flaw is that, unless you delete a preview set before quitting, it wants to load it each time you launch Fontage, which can take a while. So, in your case, if you had your entire library available for uninstalled previewing, I bet it would take 5-10 minutes to launch Fontage.

Sorry to hear Suitcase isn't cutting it. I Love it!
 
OK, after a couple of weeks now using Panther on multiple machines, I must say it is the most revolutionary OS I have used since Mac OS on my Old SE. And I'm not kidding.

To me, Panther is more of a leap from Jaguar than OS 9 was to OS X. Here's why:

Panther doesn't just make my work easier or faster, it CHANGES THE WAY I WORK. For the better. No other OS has ever done that to this degree for me (since the original Mac OS). For others I'm sure it's not that big of a deal, but for me, it's quite a leap.

Examples:

Exposé. Holy crap. Where has this been all our lives. Completely changes workflow. Gee, I wonder if Longhorn will copy this.

Folder actions. These were in previous OSes, right? If so, I never used them cuz they were buried. Panther makes them easy to use and access. Now I've got all kinds of workgroup folders with Comments that pop up when a user tries to add something or move something or delete something or whatever. Very cool. Now they need to allow Folder Actions to activate over a network.

Inline Finder searching. Mother of God that is convenient and fast. I set mine to "Selection" searching. Windows wishes it had this kind of convenient searching.

Labels. Yes, not new to Panther, but new to OS X (outside of shareware). Most underrated OS feature ever. Gee, I wonder if Longhorn will have labels.

Finder-level archiving to zip. Goodbye Stuffit.

Preview App that annihilates Acrobat Reader and now supports 1.3 spec for transparency (thus allowing it to be used as a previewer for InDesign-created PDFs with transparency, unlike Jaguar's Preview).


These are just a few examples of how Panther has changed how I work. In fact, it is so good that I am no longer buying a G5 (right away).

------

Nitpicks:

The Finder still needs a way to show the MB size of a given file/folder without having to Get Info. The new Finder window would be perfect for this at the bottom where they now show available items and available disk space. They just need to add MB worth of selected data there. I need to know that way more than I need to know available disk space.

Likewise, in COlumn view, the right panel needs to show a summary report when selecting multiple files.

They should add in-line searching to the dialog windows. So if I'm in Photoshop and decide to open a file and can't remember where it is...inline search, BOOM!, there it is. (Photoshop's current dialog search is a mess).




That's all for now. Panther is an amazing (though subtle) OS. A MUST-HAVE.
 
MAIL:

threaded view: it puts all the things with the same title and re: that same title together.

the mails from completely different persons that start re: are NOT the same thread. how can i debug that? so fari i jsut delete the old mails to keep getting that..
 
hm, i forgot how to turn it on. in prefs? or with a click ...

the enabling groups in ichat was hard to find. i thought it'd be clicking in the buddy window, but of course it had to be a click selection in the ichat preferences. so asap i found it i use it.
 
I second most of what Mindbend says above. Panther is a quantum leap forward from Jaguar - and, for me, is so much faster it's almost like the jump into hyperspace.

Only one grumble: Safari keeps crashing - and I know the OS allows user reports to be sent direct to Apple, but this happens so frequently that I really can't be bothered filling in a form every time.

That will obviously be rectified sooner or later - on the whole, though, Panther is an awesome beast!
 
porteus,

I'm just curious. Did you do a clean install (full hard drive wipe) of Panther or just an overwrite? I'm pretty sure Safari has not crashed once in Panther on three machines for me. So in theory, Safari is actually pretty darned stable in spite of your experiences.
 
An article I read in MacWorld advised assigning Exposé features to your multi-button mouse if you have one. This made alot of sense to me because I often open it accidentaly by mousing into a corner. But doing so proved to be a challenge since the Exposé doesn't support all of my MX700 mouse buttons and there was no way to add Exposé commands to my Logitech Control Panel.

I simply assigned a keystroke command for the mouse button I wanted to use and made the same keystroke command an Exposé assignement. (Make the key assignment in in the mouse control panel first, otherwise Exposé is activated when you press the keys preventing your from entering the info into the mouse control panel. Duh!)
 
I ended up doing the same thing (using mouse buttons to activate Exposé) once ElDiablo first mentioned it here. It's a great trick. I ended up realizing that way too many apps I use make use of F9-10-11, so I had to create a more obcsure keystroke for the mouse buttons to activate. Works great!

Exposé may be the greatest OS GUI feature ever. And not just cuz it looks cool.
 
bigbadbill - thanks for the tip. I have the same mouse am up and running.

mindbend - I meant to respond to your earlier thoughts on resizing performance being unnacceptable. I agree completely and also have a DP 1 Gig. Sure it is a little better now, but it still is just enough of a delay to bug me. I know there is human factors research on delays of this type being a problem - we aren't just being picky, it is the way our brains are wired! What I would really like is an outline resizing option similar to what you see in many Linux window managers/desktop environments - possibly like the one that shows the window coordinates - not really needed for me, but it looks cool! :) I hope Unsanity does something with this - they seem to be the best bet.
 
bigbadbill - I have to thank you again. I was going to try something like this, but never got around to it until I saw your post. With your mouse control tips Expose is now UNBELIEVABLY awesome! I just finished an extensive research session on the web (I was looking into do it yourself kits for hifi tube amps) and managing 6 + browser windows across 2 monitors with Expose and my MZ700 was a snap. As a result, I just turned off Codetek Virtual Desktop as a start up item (sorry guys - it is a great app, but Expose is a different approach to the same problem - managing multiple windows).
 
Since I started working at my new job a daily ritual is to connect to the 6 shared volumes which all reside on one shared server.

I was really happy when Panther came out, since it regressed to the multi-share connection approach that OS9 had. Connecting to one shared server produces a list (and active connection) to all the shares on that machine.

I'm speaking from a SAMBA connection.

But the problem I've been having is that the server inconsistently shows up as a share. For some reason, my Panther machine ignores the share. Even though I can use my other machine (test machine) which only has Jaguar on it to find that share.

Also, the browse connect option is soooo slooooow... almost to the point where my morning ritual is to come in, set my machine up, try to connect to the network, walk away, talk to some people around the office, get myself something to drink, then come back to my desk to discover it just connecting.

In the morning this is not an issue, as I have nothing pending. But when I have an Account Executive standing over my shoulder looking for information that I need to pull from the network, it creates an issue.

So during one of the spontaneously absent share moments, that I hunted down the server I just manually connected using Command+K and typing in the IP address... I was shocked at how much faster this is. Which begs the question... why? Why is the GUI soooo slooooooow?

Any information would be appreciated!
 
The slow response may be due to some configuration of Rendezvous (searching to all possible points on your network before giving you any choices) glad to hear you found a quick alternate. Would bringing up a share work more quickly, if you create an alias for the share, keep it on the desktop, or somewhere handy for you? My theory would be that the share would respond and mount when you open the alias, going directly to that shore only. Might be worth a try. You could keep a folder with aliases for your normal shares. I don't work with any shares, so I can't test this.
 
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