shamino0's Journal: MacOS Panther - first impressions

I just installed Panther (aka 10.3), the latest version of MacOS X on my Macintosh G4 system.

I haven't really had time to put it through it's paces yet, but here's what I've learned so far.

The Good

The first thing I noticed is that the system is much faster than 10.2. The system boots up much quicker, applications seem to launch faster, and the GUI in general seems a bit snappier.

Unlike many people, I actually like the brush-metal appearance of the system.

Nearly all of my applications continued working fine after the upgrade. The big exception is Emacs - which I had to re-compile. The apps that I used so far without problem are: AOL Instant Messenger, Mozilla (both versions 1.5 and 1.6), AppleWorks, and FileMaker Pro. There are a lot more apps that I use regularly, but haven't gotten around to running them since the upgrade, but oveall, I get the impression that most programs should run fine.

One program that I must explicitly test is Retrospect. I currently use version 5.0 to make my backups. But 5.1 is the oldest version that Dantz has officially tested and certified with Panther. I plan on upgrading to version 6 when it ships next month, but until then, I hope I will be able to continue to make backups of my system. Given the low-level that Retrospect interfaces with MacOS, I won't just assume compatibility the way I would for other apps.

Update: Since I first wrote this article, I have had a chance to run Retrospect 5.0. It works just fine in Panther with my tape drive (A FireWire Exabyte VXA-1 drive.)

Expose' is way-cool. I didn't use it much, except to test it out, but it definitely works as advertised. I did notice, unfortunately, that you can not assign the F14, F15 and F16 keys as hotkeys for it.

The old "Key Caps" program is now integrated into the international settings. You can configure the language menu so that there's a keyboard map choice. This is much more convenient than launching Key Caps from the Utilities folder. One change I'd suggest, however, is that they provide the option to make the keyboard diagram bigger. On my 1920x1440 display, the keys are really too small to read comfortably.

I also noticed that they added many new keyboard maps. The two that I found of particular interest are a Unicode-based extended US-English map - which changes the keys for the accented characters (typed by holding down "option" while pressing other keys.) - and a "Hebrew-QWERTY" layout (where letters mostly appear over the keys whose English letters are pronounced similarly.) The normal Hebrew layout has the keys positioned the way they have been positioned on Hebrew typewriters - which is different.

The Font Book looks like a really interesting program. I barely scratched the surface of playing with it, however, so I really can't review it here.

Finally, the X11 server has been improved. There's a new terminal type defined, xterm-color, which allows color-using console apps to work as expected. xterm-color also works in the non-X11 Terminal windows. They also added a preference which lets you decide whether CMD-key sequences that the X11 menu bar uses should be handled by the X11 menu bar or be passed to the application (where they are seen as meta-key sequences.) This is very much appreciated, since a lot of X11 apps use the Meta key for different things.

The Bad

I don't know what the folks at Apple were smoking when they designed sidebar for the new Finder. Although the general design is fine, they seem to have completely abandoned all concept of internal consistency.

When you double-click on a folder, a new window opens up with that folder. If you hold down option when doing this, the old folder will close behind you. This is the way MacOS has worked from the very beginning, and folders in Panther still behave this way. Icons in the Finder toolbar of 10.2 behave similarly (but using a single-click instead of a double-click.

But icons in the sidebar behave differently. When you click on one of them, the content of the current window is replaced with the target's contents. But the window itself is not resized or repositioned. You need to hold option down in order to make a new window open up from one of these icons. And there doesn't appear to be any way to make it open a new window and close the parent window (which is the behavior I really like - I got into the habit of option-clicking toolbar icons with 10.2.)

There is no need for this kind of inconsistency. They could just as easily have made these icons behave as the 10.2 toolbar icons behaved. If somebody really likes this new behavior, they could provide an option to have it go either way. I'm sure I'll quickly get into the habit of pressing option whenever I click on one of these icons, but I shouldn't have to change my habits over something as minor as this.

They also did away with the internet system preference pane. This is the pane where you configure your default mail and web application. Some of it's features (like the iDisk tab) have been moved into other preference panes, but the mail/web application preferences have been deleted. Now, in order to pick a default mail application, you need to launch the bundled Mail application and pick the default application from its Preferences page. Similarly, to change the default web browser, you need to launch Safari and pick the default application from its Preferences page.

This is a terrible design. The system setting that I use to decide whether my web browser is Safari, Mozilla, IE or something else should not be made as a part of any particular web browser. What if I should decide to delete Safari because I find I don't use it? All of a sudden, I can no longer change this setting. Ditto for mail (and I have occasionally considered deleting Mail, since I don't use it and probably never will.) There is really no excuse for this kind of behavior.

Apple's voice synthesis is still in the system, but it's quality has degraded yet again. When OS X first came out, the voices became choppy comapred to their performance on MacOS versions 7 through 9. Now, the basic character of the voices have changed. Certain words are pronounced differently from before. For example, I have my AOL Instant Messenger client speak the phrase "Jim has signed on" and "Jim has signed off" when my friend Jim signs on and off. This always sounded OK in 10.2. Now, however, the words "Jim" and "signed" are drawn out slightly more than they should be, and the pacing has changed, making the voice sound like it is a character in a sci-fi movie suffering from radiation posioning. All of the non-comic voices (Fred, Victoria, etc.) seem to suffer from this. Changing the speed of the voice doesn't help much.

The Ugly

The first time I used the System Preferences program after a new installation, it crashed. All I did was change my desktop wallpaper (and browse through the available images.) This only happened once, and I have since downloaded the updater to upgrade to 10.3.2, so I may not see it again. But it's definitely not a good sign when something like this happens.

Fast user switching works as advertised, but with a few differences:

• It's slower than advertised. If you switch to a user that's not logged in, it takes a significant amount of time to make the switch. Even when the user is logged in, there is a noticeable delay. My computer is a dual 1GHz G4 system with a GeForce 4MX video card. There shouldn't be this kind of delay on this hardware. Now I know why Apple always runs their demos on G5 systems.
• If the two users you're switching between have their desktops set for different resolutions, you don't get the rotating-cube effect. Instead, the screen fades to black and the new screen fades in. I can understand this, however - you are changing screen resolutions, which is something you really can't do in the middle of an animation and have it continue to look good.
• When you log off from a user, you go back to the normal login screen, with the still-logged-in users marked as such. This is OK, but I would prefer the option to automatically jump back to another still-logged-in user, especially if there is only one other logged in at the time.
• I don't think there is a way to log a user off without first switching to that user. It would be nice if I could remain at my user's desktop and quickly logout another user's desktop.

The Displays menu no longer shows all of my monitor's resolutions. My monitor has never been able to properly report all of its resolutions to MacOS - in 10.2, if I tell the Displays preference pane to only show supported resolutions, all but 800x600 become unavailable - but all of the major resolutions were still available from the menu bar icon. Now, the menu bar icon only shows 800x600 - meaning I have to go to the Displays preference pane in order to pick something else.

And while I'm talking about resolutions, the Panther installer reset every one of my user accounts (I have 6 right now) back to 800x600 resolution. This is probably related to the above issue with auto-detection, but it's still annoying.

I've also found that the resolution used for the login screen is the resolution of whatever user logged-out last. This is just silly. I would prefer that this remain consistent. Either hard-code one, or use the resolution of the root (or administrator) account, or provide a system preference. But not this.