Apple today seeded build 7B53 of Mac OS X 10.3, Panther, to developers. “We are fast approaching first candidate build,” Apple told developers in the build’s seed note. As usual, the new build was posted to the Apple Developer Connection Web site.
Apple seeds Panther build 7B53; “approaching first candidate”
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Anyone here have access to these seeds? I’m not asking for a link, just interested in it vs. MacOS 10.2. I’ce heard rumours regarding its performance, however, it is pretty hard to get a real perspective as fanboys tend to over exadurate (just as pc fanboys over exadurated over Windows XP whilst in beta).
“Additionally, this build changes the FileVault home directory file format to Journaled HFS+.”
What format was used previously?
I’m on build build 7B44 right now and GUI speed is awesome compared to Jaguar there are still some major bugs though. I did some tests with Xbench which showed some major improvements in speed overall.
About the filevault, i think it was just HFS+ because when changing a HFS+ formatted drive to HFS+ Journaled it just adds some additional info to the system, it doesn’t need to format your drives.
Can’t wait to get my hands on build 7B53, hope the finder will be more stable because it quits from time to time but i haven’t had any kernel panics whatsoever and it has been running for 5 days now, go apple.
Probably standard HFS+. HFS+ was not originally Journaled, and Journaling was added in 10.2 as a non-default option. Obviously Apple has improved the performance of the Journaling option enough to make it a default!
I hope that disk IO is faster. Slow IO is my biggest gripe with Mac OS X. Well, that and the fact that Alt + Tab doesn’t work well for applications with multiple windows.
To switch between apps, command (apple) + tab. To switch between windows in the same app, command (apple) + ~ (tilde).
“that and the fact that Alt + Tab doesn’t work well for applications with multiple windows.”
That’s what exposé is here to fix 🙂
>I hope that disk IO is faster. Slow IO is my biggest gripe with Mac OS X.
The amazing speedup of disk I/O over OS 9 is a Compelling Feature here. Are you referring to journaling? (haven’t played with that.)
RE: Beavis (IP: —.ks.ok.cox.net)
I hope that disk IO is faster. Slow IO is my biggest gripe with Mac OS X. Well, that and the fact that Alt + Tab doesn’t work well for applications with multiple windows.
I am not too sure whether this is relevant, however, there was a benchmark recently and from the output, the kernel is much better tuned for the PPC. The new compiler scheduler as also helped fix things up.
What has been good news is now Carbon is a first class citizen and the speed of Carbon Applications are now alot better which should result in Corel Draw being more responsive. Painter 8 is very nice, it is ashame Corel keep working on Photopaint when Painter 8 is clearly a better tool and able to compete with Photoshop.
We’re running Panther 7B49 on one of our non-critical box and I can say that Panther’s GUI is significantly faster than Jaguar. Probably twice to three times as fast. Also, networking is much more refined…. particularly for when a server drops off.
In b44 if you were running an AStudio application that read and wrote preferences (user defaults) it was perfect–in 49, it no longer worked. Any application that you would try to launch that needed to read in preferences would fail. Any word on this in b53? We moved back to 44 for this reason, since we have a lot of AStudio created apps that read and write to those user defaults.
Why doesn’t Apple use softupdates and UFS instead of implementing journaling on HFS+ as an afterthought? Oh well. The current situation is better than having neither I suppose.
“the kernel is much better tuned for the PPC.”
This would be a good thing, since
1) It does not run on PPC in general, only G3, G4 and G5.
2) PPC has been out for 9+ years.
and the idea of “First Candidate” sounds more like a political race, then “Final Release Candidate” which is what the nim-noe probibly ment.
Everyone keeps saying how much faster Panther is, especially on a G5 – god, I crave benchmarks! 🙂 What all, besides the obvious, has been changed? I hear the kernel has been souped up and that UFS is now much faster then before, spiffy. Does UFS still break carbon/classic apps?
On http://www.barefeats.com/g5.html at the bottom, there is this:
“PANTHER PUNCH”
Meanwhile, here’s some data on the speed increase that OS X “Panther” (10.3) will provide G5 owners once it’s released. We ran Xbench 1.1 on a G5 1.8GHz with 10.3 beta build 7B49. Compared to 10.2.7 “Jaguar”….
….CPU score increased 40%
….Thread score increased 44%
….Memory score increased 38%
On http://www.barefeats.com/g5.html at the bottom, there is this:
“PANTHER PUNCH”
Meanwhile, here’s some data on the speed increase that OS X “Panther” (10.3) will provide G5 owners once it’s released. We ran Xbench 1.1 on a G5 1.8GHz with 10.3 beta build 7B49. Compared to 10.2.7 “Jaguar”….
….CPU score increased 40%
….Thread score increased 44%
….Memory score increased 38%