Here is a review of Mac OS X Panther 10.3, the new offering by Apple, only a few days after its release.
Installation
Installation worked without any problems. The installation process was simple but still had enough options to allow me to customize it as much as I wanted. Panther comes with 4 CDs, three of which include Panther itself.
The increased number of CDs is apparently due to the inclusion of new voices for the Speech Synthesizer.The fourth installer includes XCode, additional BSD subsystem parts, and developer manuals and examples. Installing XCode (even over an existing Project Builder installation) takes around 700 megabytes with all examples included, the actual program takes around 200 megabytes to be usable.
Upon booting, the installer lets you choose the installation language and hard drive, and after agreeing to the terms of the license lets you select different packages. You can choose to install or not install the BSD subsystem, individual iApps, Printer Drivers, Fonts, System Languages, Speech Synthesizer voices and X11. After this step the actual installation starts. The installer gave an estimated installation of 44 minutes, which is about as long as the actual installation took. This is quite quick compared to the last Windows installation I performed, but the after initially displaying 44 minutes the number went down to 8 minutes and then continued to display several wrong values. The installation still works perfectly though. After CD 1 is finished my computer spit it out and asked me to insert the next one. CD 2 and 3 only took a short time to install, mostly because I was only installing X11 and the iApps due to space concerns. The computer then restarted into Panther.
First Impressions
The entire system seems faster and more polished. Icons and Programs open differently: The icons increase in size and then fade into nothing, as the program starts. New finder windows now move in from the top of the screen and option windows flip down from the top of the window. Small changes like these exist across the entire system.
Graphical effects are noticeably smoother and window resizing is smoother, though this has never been a big issue to me. Display of text and pdfs is also faster, and so are many other parts of the system.
Command-Tab is greatly improved, and though it now works similarly to Alt-Tab on windows, the effect is much more visually pleasing. It is now also possible to hit Command-Tab and then move through the applications using the arrow keys which was a feature that was really missing from the old version.
None of my existing applications broke, though I did have a few problems with some of them, but more about that later. Something that I did notice, however, is that LaunchBar moved from the right corner of the menu bar towards the left. This is because OS X automatically orders the icons in the menu bar and the hack that LaunchBar used to override this was removed. This did not cause me any significant problems though. Overall the first impression was very positive.
Exposé
The most famous feature of Panther is of course Exposé, and it is also one of the most useful. Exposé supports three functions, the first of which shrinks and moves all windows on the computer so that they are all visible at the same time. The user can then select which window to use. The second feature sorts windows by application and allows user to cycle through the different applications. Finally, the third feature moves all windows off the screen, to reveal the desktop which enables the user to see all Desktop icons. For people who usually have multiple windows open (which is very common in OS X) Exposé is extremely useful. According to fellow Mac user Albert Andersen:
Using Exposé reduces the task of getting to any window open to constant time. Normally, it is a task that is approximately O(n), where n is some combination of the number of applications open and the number of windows in each application.
This is of course not intended to be entirely serious, but it is an interesting statement of Exposé’s functionality. Expose, however, still has its share of problems. On my dual display setup, Exposé is noticeably slower than when used on just one display, but it is still very much usable. The problem is of course due to the graphics card having to double the work that it usually does, and similar problems appear with transitioning background images, where the transition is not quite as smooth as on single monitor machines.
Another problem is that full display applications do not always behave correctly. Bryce 5 for instance, gets split up into multiple little windows and it is not possible to select the entire program after that. In order to combine them into one window the user has to select a different window, and then switch to Bryce without using Exposé.
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.
Any Student ADC Members receive their copy of Panther yet?
Are we going to get it for free? Thought we had to pay too.
I run SETI on my Power Mac G4 and installating of Panther it took an average of 9.5 hours to calculate one set of data. After Panther was installed the time has gone down to an average of about 8.3 hours. This is better than a 10% increase in speed.
Applications felt like they were opening faster and the data from the SETI calculations would support this ‘feeling’. I am happy with the new OS and have no serious complaints. It was worth the upgrade.
Again, I am disappointed at apple!
They have not included CARBON Greek support!!!!!
Greek support is left to Rainbow Hellas S.A., and their implementations are generally hacks (had the greek patch by them, not easy to get either, and I had to clean install panther because a direct upgrade from the patched jaguar was not doable).
Why oh why doesn’t apple just provide fonts, scripts, keyboard layouts for carbon greek? It seems that carbon will be here for a while and productivity apps (filemaker, MS word, etc) are carbon… either move completely to cocoa and the built in greek is fine, or provide us with a carbon compatible keyboard please!
Panther rocks, pure and simple. I did a clean install on my 700 megahertz ibook and everything is so much faster, especially the Finder, Preview, and Mail. And, of course, Expose is totally awesome.
For those non-Mac users, check out the quicktime movie on this page for an Expose demo:
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/
(Click on the “Try it Out”)
Anyway, I have had zero problems with Panther, same with all my Mac friends. I have heard that some people are having external FW drive problems, but I have an external LaCie FW drive and it works perfectly fine. I backed up all my data to it before doing the wipe and installation of Panther, and then restored all my data. No problems.
Overall, for me, Panther was definitely worth the upgrade price.
I don’t know how I lived without Expose. I always have multiple windows open on my iBook and now I can quickly access them all with my wireless Logitech Mouseman (has five buttons). I asigned the thumb button to “All Windows” and I use it constantly. I bought the Family Pack and installed it on two iBooks and an iMac and it works great.
Has anyone performed an upgrade from Jaguar? I would be interested to see how that process went. Everything that I have read is about a clean install. I would be really interested to see how well Apple’s upgrade routine goes.
I tried to upgrade my Powerbook and it wouldn’t work, it said that it “found errors” during the scanning. I had to re-install on top.
Thanks Eugenia, I was wondering about this. I have “jumped the gun” a bit here and already started an upgrade. We’ll see how it all goes? I probably should have waited, but… oh well. I am concerned about a lot of the applications breaking and so-forth…
…….. good thing I backed up everything beforehand.
schwew!
How many work units on it this based on after/previous to the update..?! More than 1-2-3-4-5? — The calculation time varies *a lot* for different work units and unless you use the same unit which you didn’t or use the client over a long period of time this doesn’t mean anything (and you didn’t do that either because there’s no 10.3 for a long time)…
upgraded from Jag…..zero issues. Used the standard ‘upgrade’ option for intallation.
Rock on.
With the function of Expose that shows the desktop, will it let you work with the Desktop while it’s activated? Eg, can you press and hold the hotkey to show the desktop, do a little desktop file management (drop a file into a folder, etc), then release the hotkey and have open apps re-appear?
I think the answer is yes.
See:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20030926115215758
well, the speed increases in SETI@home must be from API optimizations, and perhaps some new prefetching alogrithims in the device manager…they might have even tweeked the memory manager (if SETI@home is running, it mgiht have switched to a batch mode memory managment so it coulr efficently prefetch data to place it in the memory for processing)
I mean, a processor can only crunch so fast once it gets the data, so refinments in the OS managment algorithims is the only way to speed up such activity.
Yes it does. You push the hotkey once, do whatever you want do and then push the hotkey again.
I wasn’t too sure of how useful this would be, before I actually tried it, but there are lots of cool uses for it.
— “Has anyone performed an upgrade from Jaguar? I would be interested to see how that process went. Everything that I have read is about a clean install. I would be really interested to see how well Apple’s upgrade routine goes.” —
I not only upgraded from Jaguar when I first got it, but now a couple days later I have done a clean install. The upgrade went perfectly fine for me, and I had done all kinds of interesting hacks and moved things around and such. Frankly, of all the junk I had on here the only thing that actually didn’t work after the upgrade was PHP in Apache. Easily fixed by reinstalling the latest Entropy package.
Now that Ive done a clean install however (upgraded to larger hard drive), Im even more impressed. Its not significantly faster or better in any significant ways IMHO, and that means the upgrade did a damn good job. I wouldn’t worry.
Did anyone else find it ironic that Panther is finally released but the splash screen on http://www.apple.com is still itunes for Windows?
Excellent! That is encouraging information. I hope my upgrade goes so smoothly.
“Yes it does. You push the hotkey once, do whatever you want do and then push the hotkey again.”
Could be annoying, no? Let’s suppose you hide all your windows to do other things, and finally you don’t want to restore the previous state.
The next time you press the hotkey, your windows will be displayed again instead of hiding the windows???
I think that having two hotkeys, one for hide and the other for “unhide” would be better (I dislike the automatic re-display of Windows).
I wonder why is Expose so talked about?
It seems like some nice polish in the UI, but it’s still only a minor feature, I’d say..
I don’t really see this is ironic. Panther was on the frontpage for quite some time, and only then moved down to give back space to iTunes. Many Windows users are going to visit http://www.apple.com to see what this iTunes thing is, and are not willing to look around to find it. Panther on the other hand is targeted towards Mac enthusiasts, who are more likely to visit apple.com regularily or look around a bit more.
Every time I’ve looked at it for the past few days, the focus has been on the new G4 iBooks.
What shows on the front changes from moment to moment it seems.
I went to Apple.com and it showed the iBooks….refresh showed the iBooks….refresh showed iTunes….
you get the picture
I agree with you about the varying difficulties in processing work units for Seti. However I noticed a similar 10% increase in my XBench app score and that should be consistent, even if not actually representative of real world application performance.
No, that’s not how it works. You can’t move the windows around between when you activate Expose and when you deactivate it. Also, if you open new windows while Expose is activated like that, they remain on top when you deactivate it. Hence there’s no need for separate keys.
Don’t forget that Expose is not only activated by hotkeys, but by hotcorners. I know it seems like a silly thing to mention, but it goes a long way with ease of use. It’s what really makes this a must have for mouse oriented users.
actualy, you need to do a quick click to get it to “stick” then you can work on stuff…when you are done, you can just click again and all the windows return
I noticed that rather than logging out the User first then allowing another person to log in, OS X allows the other user to type their password from the active user’s session
MUCH better, and a bit quicker, than the windows way IMHO
Franky, Exposé sounds less useful then multiple desktops to me.
well, since you have never used it, you would not know.
I can tell you, I have used both, and much preffer Exposé to Virtual Desktops. Virtual Desktops are clunky ways to get your work done.
Did you like Virtual Desktops when you used them?
Maybe I should refrase that.. did you actually use them a lot? or did you juse use KDE once… and decided they suck?
they were cool when I first used them (I had moved from windows to Linux at the time)
but as time went on, I found it more of a pain to use them when I was doing work than they were worth.
with Expose, I can just click my mouse button (you have to map it to the button you like, or mouse button key combo)
move the windows out of the way, open what I need, or do what I need to do, close it and click the windows back, OR click the mouse button to spread my windows out and select the app I want, OR bring all windows out for the app I am using and see what is going on and select the window I need.
all Apple needs to do is allow tab switching of apps to be maped to another combo and I can manage all my windows from the mouse buttons.
I used Linux for 4 years with nothing else before I got my Mac with OS X ( I still use Linux…and I have an XP laptop now as well
)
so I had and HAVE plenty of exposure to Virtual Desktops.
Panther changed the way it works with windows and now my WIndows laptop can’t see my home folder after I turned sharing on. do I need to enable my home foulder to be shared? if so how do I do it. I looked in get info and there was nothing.
and my XP laptop does not see my USB printer connected to the Mac like I heard it was suppose to. it is suppose to appear like a PS printer so I can just see it when I browse. but this does not happen, I have to put in the CUPS path to get it to work.
With my setup no windows ever need to be under any other windows.. if I want to not see an app for now all I have to do is drag it on the pager to another desktop.. and if I need it again and can’t remember where I dragged it, all I have to do is middle click on the desktop and I see a handy window list. If I want a window hidden just to see whats under it, all I have to do is roll my mouse wheel up on it’s window title, and then roll it down to get it back.
Alt Z and X go among the desktops very quickly and the mouse wheel moved among desktops also.
both do the same thing for the user, but to me, Expose does not interupt the workflow as much as Virtual desktops do, and when you get skilled at it, you can be even more effective IMO using expose.
but what ever. it is like the diffrence between using a wooden handel Hammer (Virtual Desktops) and a fiber glass handled hammer (expose)
the newer one is slicker and has certain attributes the other does not have but the older one does the job fine as well.
debman:
fast switching is not login/logout. This is something which is known long time ago by the way although not for Apple users. Fast switching is the ability to login to second account without logging off the first one. That can be done in XP and OS X. Why this urge to proof that OS X is better or more innovative in everything whatever that would be?
I know that, I use windows all the time at home.
but in windows, it takes you to the log-in screen when you say “switch user”.
in OS X, while you can still go out to the log-in screen if you would like to, OS X lets the users switch right from teh session and enter the other user’s session right away with no intermediat screen, like the log-in screen.
So instead of full screen window there is small window?
no, you select the user’s name from a drop down list in the right corner, if the user has a password, you get prompted to type it in in a pop-up window and then it enters the session, if there is no password, it just goes into the session.
windows key + L switch instantly to the user selection. Klick on icon. That would make it even faster. I am not defending windows (personally I think that latter than better) but I dont see that much difference here. By the way on BSD/linux press ctrl+alt+Fx enter name and password next enter xinit — :X. That would make it more cumbersome.
Or they could have further optimized the standard libraries that Seti@HOME calls and contributed to the speed increase.
W/ Linux it is faster if you use GDM.. You just run gdmflexiserver and login again. Also it allows you to login again in another window which I doubt either OSX or XP allow you to do.
There’s a good chance that freezing issue is related to MirrorAgent.
Try disabling automatic sync of iDisk (if you use that) and the freezing may well seize. It did for me.
MirrorAgent needs a bit of polish it seems..
Has anyone else had the experience where you open the finder and the scroll bars are missing? I went into my ‘Applications’ directory and could not scroll up or down, but after switching to another folder and then back….. it seemed to have fixed itself.
Just interested to see if anyone else had seen this yet?
I’d like to switch from my Dell XP-based laptop to a Powerbook. Can 10.3 let me log into a Windows 2000 domain? Regardless, I would still have to purchase Office v.X with Virtual PC running XP Pro for some legacy apps. Can’t wait to upgrade my fiance’s Mac to 10.3 anyways. Thanks!
I heard that it does, I would investigate on Apple’s site for the particulars. look in the support section under panther, also look in disscussions, and ask around there. and I am sure there will be a “lost manual” book coming out soon, there might be some nice infor in that as well about it.
I just did a clean install on my iMac. Does anybody know how to re-install the classic environment from the disc that came with my computer without installing all of the extra applications and crap that the installer wants to with it? There is not custom install that I can see.