On 08/11/2003, at 10:53 PM, Richard Kay wrote:
My top five Panther features (in order of preference):
1. Speed. My iBook is 30 to 50 percent faster.
2. Expose. It makes managing multiple open windows a breeze on my
iBook's relatively small 14 inch screen.
3. Finder window. It makes it really easy to get around ... it felt a
bit strange at first but after one week it has become second nature.
And it is much easier to hit the eject button in the Sidebar to eject
a disk than dragging the disk image to the trash like we had to do in
10.2.X and 10.1.X.
4. Threaded mail. At long last I can work out who is saying what in
the more popular WAMUG posts.
5. COMMAND - TAB application switcher. I just discovered this about 10
minutes ago. Cool! If you haven't seen this ... try it. Lets you jump
from one application to another on the fly.
I'll go along with these, and add Fast User Switching. Bear in mind,
though, that point 5 is not new. It also works in Jaguar, except that
it uses the Dock instead of its own windoid. The Panther way is an
improvement, since it shows you only the apps which are currently
running instead of a whole Dock's worth.
I thought that this was another feature that Apple had "adopted" from
Micro$oft, since Windows had been doing this since the Windows 3 days.
Recent reading tells me, however, that it originally appeared in the
NeXT operating system, so I guess it has simply come back home.
So far my biggest disappointments are
1. Built-in Faxing. It seems to work OK, but there's no audible modem
so it's difficult to tell that anything's happening, and there's no log
or Fax register of any sort, so really hard to tell what faxes have
been sent. The only clues come from opening a Dock icon which appears
when the fax is being sent, but it's nowhere near enough help. I'm
really looking forward to version 2 of this thing.
2. Font Book. I spent a great deal of time going through and
"resolving" duplicate fonts. I really wish I hadn't. Now AppleWorks
crashes when trying to build its font list, and other programs have
problems as well (Frehand MX crashes when accessing certain fonts, for
example). These problems do not occur if I switch to another account in
which I haven't fiddled with fonts at all.
Both of these things are at version 1 and will no doubt improve as
Panther matures. In every other repect, though, I think Panther is a
great upgrade and there have been subtle improvements in almost every
aspect.
--
Peter Hinchliffe
Apwin Computer Services FileMaker Pro Solutions Developer
Perth, ::::::::::::::::::::::::
Western Australia Phone (618) 9332 6482 Fax (618) 9332 0913
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Mac because I prefer it -- Windows because I have to.
