New Features
The Finder:
The Finder has greatly changed from the last version, and many of these changes were very much needed. There is now a bar at the left that has shortcuts to all drives on the computer, the local network, and several folders that the user can customize. New Finder windows now show the users home directory by default instead of the current volume, which seems a lot more sensible. The new networking is a lot simpler than having to use Connect to Server from the menu bar, and browsing another users' computer now works the same way as browsing local folders
Fast User Switching:
Much has been said about fast user switching and about how much sense the transition effect from one user to the next makes from an HCI perspective: The turning cube signifies the switching to a different perspective of the same object (same computer, different user). Apart from the beauty of this effect, Fast User Switching is also a very useful feature. Having to turn off applications when switching to a different user was very annoying, which meant that I never used it until now.
Preview:
In Panther, Preview now has enough features to be used without any inconveniences. It supports three modes: Dragging, Text selection and area selection, and it is possible to search the document. Pdf rendering is much much faster and hitting the keyboard arrows now scrolls down in the document rather than moving it to the next page, which is what most people expect it do anyway. The new Preview also supports multi-page Tiffs, which is nice for users of some Fax-to-email services.
DVD Player:
It is now finally possible to watch DVDs on displays other than the main display. Until now I had to watch DVDs on my 15" internal display, or switch the main display to be my Cinema Display in order to play DVDs. It was also not possible to switch displays while the DVD Player was running. It is now possible to watch DVDs on either monitor, and while dragging the window across, the DVD displays on both monitors at the same time. Upon letting go of the window, it automatically moves to the side, so it displays on just one monitor.
Other Features:
Panther now also supports printing to Windows shared printers (one of my favorite features), emailing Attachments to Windows users without the resource fork, faxing, and contains a new utility called FontBook, which allows better organization of Fonts, a capability invaluable to anyone doing graphics or typesetting work.
Problems
Since installing Panther I have run into some problems that I have never had before, some small and others quite significant. Upon installing the new version of X11, X forwarding broke. I figured that my ssh_config file was replaced with a new version, but could not find the file anymore. I then found it /etc, but could not modify it because the sudo command could not be found anymore. I went on to install XCode and quickly solved the problem. The installation backed up all old configuration files and once I had sudo working I just restored the old version, which fixed everything.
Although none of my apps were broken, I encountered three System freezes, which upset me very much. After the first one I had to restart the system. The second one happened today while writing this review, and I was very much afraid that I would lose what I had already written. It then miraculously started responding after 2 minutes, and immediately froze again. After 10 minutes it finally started working again. It then froze a final time after which I had to restart it. This has not happened in the last few hours and might have been caused by iChat's problems with transferring large files. I am confident that it will be fixed in the 10.3.1 release, and I have not yet talked to anyone who has encountered any similar issues.
Conclusion
Though there still are some small problems in Panther it it is a great new OS X release that addresses many small and large issues users were having with prior versions. Not everything that's different in Panther is immideately visible; there are many small changes under the hood that improve the user experience as a whole, but are not themselves noticable. But after using the system for some time, it becomes apparent how important these improvments are.
About the Author
I am a Sophomore in Computer Science at Stanford. I have been using Mac OS X for a year. Before, I had used both Windows and Linux and had a brief stint with BeOS. My current computer is a 800 Mhz PowerBook G4, 512 MB of RAM, a 40 Gigabyte hard drive and an external 20" Cinema Display.
- "Installation, Impressions, Expose"
- "Features, Problems, Conclusion"
