Panther Analysis Getting Underway 463
Durin_Deathless writes "Think Secret has posted their first article analyzing the changes from Mac OS X 10.2 to 10.3. In this first installment, they look at the changes to the Installation, System Requirements, the Finder, and some other things.
They have some nice images available too."
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
This looks like a strong release (Score:5, Interesting)
Expose is a great example of the combination of Apple's design sense and what you can do with the Quartz compositing engine. Windows scale down so you can see all of your open windows, or all of the documents in an application. I don't think its even technically possible to do that on windows because they lack an alpha channel.
I've used iChat AV and it is soooo much better than windows messenger. Unlike messenger, which forces me to a single postage-stamp sized video window, I can scale my video to any size and even go full screen. Audio conferencing seems to be pretty clear and will be great for when I'm on dial-up or talking to someone w/o a camera.
I can't wait to see more.
Expose! (Score:5, Interesting)
It basically eliminates the need for multiple desktops. I'm sure you're probably saying: "Well why not just use multiple desktops in the first place." The best answer to that is, apple likes to make simple/easy to use software. Multiple desktops are too much of a poweruser feature, and are confusing to use for the first time for many -- and that first time is KEY to adoption (afterall, the first impression you get about something is most likely to be the most important). Much like apple's aversion to tabbed interfaces, though tabbed browsing is one of those exceptions apple can't get past because it's too entrenched in browsers today.
I can give you more info [otierney.net] but you're best looking at apple's preview [apple.com].
Some interesting questions (Score:5, Interesting)
2. The searching system - does it maintain some sort of small database in the background to keep things fast, or just start off with a "find" style command?
3. Right now, you can't seem to drag documents onto the Application Icons on the left side to have them open automatically - any chance of that changing?
Otherwise, the OS is looking pretty good. I still spend most of my time in either a development tool or the command line, so I'm not that big into Finder and the like. (A good old ~/do[TAB]/pro[TAB] gets me to my ~/Documents/Projects folder quite fast enough).
But I do like the idea of when you select an icon, the entire square around it highlights. I've had too many times I've selected image files, and since OS X makes little thumbnail images of the picture the icon symbol, sometimes it's hard to tell if you've selected it or not (especially if the picture is already composed of dark shades).
And labels - I never used OS 9 before (I'm a Linux2OSX convert), so I never got the big deal. But if they're bright and noticable like that, I can see using them to color code my personal/work/Gameforms.com stuff for quick picking.
The one thing I'm curious to look into is the Xcode development program - from the preview, it looks pretty quick and useful. Think Secret doesn't cover that here, and probably won't, but the Xcode is the #1 thing I'd like to play with.
I'd also like to see the "auto-encrypt your Home directory" talked about. From a security standpoint, I'd like to know just how that works, how much processor power it takes up in the background (hm - explains why we may need a G5, ne?). I have a group of guys at the place I work at who are into Penetration Testing, and they're thinking about going OS X - and this Encrypted Home Directory system might be useful to them. (Especially if you can tell the OS what other directories other than
Panther doesn't run on G5's (Score:2, Interesting)
The version of OSX that will ship with the G5's is 10.2.7, which has backwards hacks of 10.3 stuff like expose
My unanswered questions. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've seen no mention of specifics related to VPN support in Panther. Apple claims IPSec support. However, 10.2 has IPSec support, just no front-end. Is there a front-end for establishing an IPSec tunnel in Panther? It sounds like maybe this is integrated into the Internet Connect app?
Jobs touted updates to Mail.app but didn't mention whether you can actually do a more advanced search. The current search functionality stinks in comparison to other email clients which allow you to give any number of criteria. Has the search in Mail been improved?
Is X11 still a stand alone application in Panther or is more integrated with the OS?
The Apple Panther page says "support for popular Linux APIs". Any indication of what this means?
Is NetInfo still used as the centralized database for all OS resources or have they finally replaced it with LDAP?
OK, so you've got a new Finder... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm a recent "switchbacker" (used Mac from Plus to early PowerMac's and just got a dual G4). Since it's a ".#" release, I wasn't expecting a ton of major changes (since that should be a "#." release). However, this is the second review I've seen that spends the majority of it's time on the Finder. Wow. A new Finder.
I know things are different in Mac land (one reason I switched back), but not being an insider or able to attend the conference (hence, no preview copy), I'd really love to start seeing more authoritative articles on what kinds of 64-bit goodness is there for the G5's or a thorough coverage of what cool parts of FreeBSD 5 made it into Darwin/X.
Granted, it's a different perspective (I'm perfectly happy cd'ing and ls'ing from a terminal). Perhaps most Mac folks will be cheering a decent upgrade to their main view of the system.
I can't help thinking, tho, that alot of Mac
This is the kind of feature that we want to see... (Score:5, Interesting)
Features like tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, show desktop, context-sensitive help, tooltips, etc don't add to what you can acheive with your software but they do add to the richness of your user-experience by making software more flexible and user-friendly.
Very few computing tasks are truly intuitive - if you want proof of this, try putting a novice in front of a PC and watch them struggle with even the most basic concepts - but adding nice touches like this really do help users feel more at ease with their computers and more productive in the long run.
It's not earth-shattering stuff but it's stuff like this that's made today's software so much more accessible to the masses than it was 20 or even 10 years ago.
Open/save dialog boxes vs Finder? (Score:5, Interesting)
I *really* want to see a screenshot of this! (would y'all please stop /.ing the article? :) One pet peeve I've had with Macs is the
disparity between the Finder and the open/save dialogs you get from
regular software. Course this problem exists on Windows and Linux
too, but the Mac finder is much nicer, and so the disparity is more
pungent on a Mac.
I've just had too many stints where a newbie saves a file (using a save dialog) and then can't find it. Because the finder looks different. Heck, I've used these things for 20 years and I sometimes lose files myself (must be getting senile).
I REALLY want better integration with open/save dialogs so my mother can find any file she happens to save!
Re:Some interesting questions (Score:2, Interesting)
This probably uses the same mechanism that was used in OS 9 and was still used in OS X for Find By Content....Indexing. While indexing the entire hard drive was a real performance drag, in OS 9 you could schedule it to run when the computer was likely not being used (as is 2am on Sunday morning). In OS X, the Find By Content (FBC) indexing occurred each time you navigated into a directory via the Finder. If no previous index has been created, one was then made. If an index did in fact exist, it merely updated it.
So, to sum...no small database, lots of little indexes everywhere.
Piles? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anybody know? I was looking forward to hearing more about this, but fear it's fallen by the wayside...
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Brushed metal and laptops (Score:5, Interesting)
Specifically, unless your screen is fairly far forward, you can't read the metal tab title names in Safari. Those titles are just the system font on top of the metal look, so this hassle is not limited to Safari.
Given that, I think this brushed metal is an odd direction to be moving in for a company proclaiming this their year of the laptop.
Cheers,
Ian
use XShelf... (Score:1, Interesting)
My Panther Notes (Score:5, Interesting)
Exposé is so good that after only a day or two of using panther, I now find myself reaching for it when I am back on jaguar (or on windows/linux machines).
As always I have a few notes.
The Finder
1. The metallic interface should be optional.
2. Column view still lacks sorting by anything other than 'name' in column view. I would suggest adding sorting options via a contextual menu.
3. Fonts, HTML, EPS and any file handled by quicktime should be previewable right in the finder.
4. Contextual menus need to be smarter. For example if I click on a font or a saver file I should be able to send it to it's proper folder.
5. Lack of customizability is still a major complaint. There is still no way to change the font, to set the style of the desktop font, or to control grid spacing. Also we are limited to 10 point minimum font size.
6. Finder windows still take up too much screen real estate. If apple used small scrollbars it would save a significant # of pixels per window.
7. The finder still does not respect drag and drop locations when something is dropped on the desktop. This is a major sin in my book.
8. Minimization of fields in list view is still one of my pet peeves.
Why minimize 'Date Modified' to 'Dat..fied" when it could be "Date"
Why minimize 'Size' to "..." instead of 'Size' or 'kb'
Why does 48KB go from "4..b" to "..b" to "..." instead of "48k", "48", "48"... and so on. The kind field is especially dumb.
Also why doesn't the text get more condensed as it did in OS 9 when the field gets narrow.
9. Labels for items that one does not have permission to label should be handled more gracefully. Right now if you try to label something out of your permission range the labels are simply not selectable. This will be confusing to many users who don't understand permissions.
10. The way labels are indicated in column view is extremely confusing. Especailly if your highlight color is similar to a label, labeled items appear to have been selected.
11. The admin should be able to control what kind of finder window a user sees and they should be able to control which drives/folders are available within the finder window.
12. A new (better) folder design would be appreciated.
13. There should be an option to turn disk images into folders (this is what users normally want to do with downloaded images).
The Dock
The current dock is great for computer newbies and casual users, but it quickly breaks down when power users are in production on a big project.
1. Exposé is fantastic, but it still does not solve the problem of minimized windows (it does not show windows minimized to the dock although it probably should). While minimized windows will be used less often when users get the hang of Exposé, there is still a need for some sort of windowshading that allows for speedy one or two click window swapping. I personally miss having windowshade from OS 9 and had a haxie installed to add this behavior. Even better is minimize-in-place hack from unsanity which recently became available. I have found shading invaluable in production. The standard OS X minimize/maximize simply takes too long to swap between windows and windows get lost in the dock. Also exposé, does not solve the problem of window clutter (many of our designers are clean desktop sort of people), while some sort of shading allows for clean desktops and efficient production. 3rd party hacks are great, but having it built in would be better.
2. Grouping would really help the power user. I currently have 80 items in the dock and can never find anything. I use all my apps frequently so I want easy access to them. If instead of having them all minimized, I had springlloaded tabs in the manner of O
Re:1 WEEK WITH PANTHER (Score:3, Interesting)
Waaay back when OS X was under development and hadn't shipped yet I read a blurb about themes on one of the reasonably reliable (haha) rumor sites. It seems that themes was something they were actually planning on but Steve played with Kalieadescope (themes for OS 9) to try the idea out and *hated* it with a passion. He thought 99.9% of the themes were amateurish, ugly and big steps backwards in terms of usability and the remaining
Usually I don't give much credence to rumor sites, especially when their claiming to know what specific people did and though... BUT this anecdote aligns so perfectly with everything we know about Jobs, his personality and his values, that it seems very likely something like this IS what happened to the theme support which was known to be in development way back then.
Re:Because, As We All Know... (Score:3, Interesting)
Intiutive? Clicking the timecode in the window to get to balance, treble, and bass controls is
You can accomplish all of the things you do with 6.2's Player with the embedded QT pane you see in Web browser windows when you load a QT movie or MPEG or whatever. All that's missing are the first and last frame buttons, and I'm sure a little creativity will come up with a way to include them.
Re:Some interesting questions (Score:1, Interesting)
2. "Get Info" (CMD+I) on a volume mounted on your desktop. In the get Info window there is a section for 'Content Index' and buttons to index the drive or delete the index. This makes one suspect that the searching does use some sort of database.
3. Drag and Drop safari to the sidebar. Drag and drop a
I believe applications will only open files they are associated with. Droping a
Relax; it's only DRM (Score:3, Interesting)
Talk about bad interface -- [WMP9] didn't even include the ability to fast forward or rewind!
Relax; it's only digital restrictions management.
Rewind, and you view something several times that you paid to view only once, transforming a "public performance" of a copyrighted audiovisual work into a "public display". The streaming video provider may not have been licensed to offer public displays.
Fast-forward, and you skip the commercials that you are obligated to have displayed by the TOS you signed with the streaming video provider.
Set default by the machine's case? (Score:2, Interesting)
How about this? Install it on a plastic computer (gumdrop iMac, lamp iMac, eMac, iBook, or older G3/G4), and you get Aqua controls by default. Install it on a pre-Ti PowerBook, and you get Dark Aqua. Install it on a metal computer (TiBook, HgMac, Power Mac G5), and you get brushed metal.
Would setting the default appearance for on-screen controls to match the appearance of the computer's case prove too confusing to users?
Re:dock (Score:2, Interesting)
What I'd really like to see Apple do is document all the Dock APIs and allow it to be replaced with third party alternatives. For example the program DragThing [dragthing.com] performs much better than the Dock in many ways. There are better Command-Tab style application switchers, such as KeyboardMaestro [keyboardmaestro.com]. These great third party alternatives cannot truly replace the Dock until more of the workings of the Dock are documented.
There's one more stumbling block: Apple has been migrating more functionality into the Dock (for reasons that are unclear to me). For example, with Jaguar, the Dock owns the Desktop. It's responsible for painting the background image, and handling clicks on the Desktop. Pre-Jaguar this was handled by the Finder. This means that much more than Dock functionality is lost if the Dock is disabled.
What about the little details? (Score:3, Interesting)
They don't sound like such a big deal, perhaps, but they truly convey a great deal of valuable information when implemented.
Also poorly done is the abysmal internal truncation ('...') of text in narrow fields when in list view. (Also applies to long file names in icon view.) I really miss the condensed type that 9 used in these cases.
"Get Info" functionality is limited, as it doesn't tell you how many items are in a folder, and I find it pretty useless that getting info on multiple items can not open multiple windows, to allow for easy comparisons.
And WHY do removable volumes NOT remember open windows when remounted? If I log out (or even restart!) with the drive connected, the windows are remembered. So why not when they are manually un/remounted? This is really inconvenient, since I routinely modify the contents of many directories during a normal working day, and would like those windows to remain open when I transfer my Firewire drive between computers.
I also hope the zoom-to-fit function is less broken than it currently is. Ditto for windows correctly remembering their settings. I am tired of that damned toolbar reappearing again and again in windows where I had turned it off.
And today I narrowly averted disaster, almost overwriting the wrong file, because its modification time will not update until I click on it. Ditto for adding files to a folder with a process other than the Finder. The window must be manually brought to the foreground (or actively selected if it is already there) before the files show up. Once again, this is a disaster waiting to happen.
So, rant aside, are ANY of these things addressed in Panther? I am resigned to not being able to turn off all the cycle-stealing eye candy (including the excessive use of translucency which is anathema to visual clarity), but since my next computer will be a G5, I suppose I'll just have to live with it... But I'd be greatly appreciative if more attention was paid to fixing the broken stuff than adding more new features to debug.
some panther notes (Score:2, Interesting)
* Fonts on brushed metal are a lot more solid. Especially at small font sizes, with smoothing off (on a powerbook's screen) the fonts are very crisp. I think some of the fonts are more "inset" in the metal than they were before
* Extremely cool searching in preview.app. A drawer is opened and search results come up as you type, per iTunes and now Finder. The drawer has little summaries of the surrounding text and page number... so useful! Just like a search eninge on the web.
* The new finder's icon: had to mention it: looks like it was drawn by a child. Yuck!
* Breaks uControl, which gave me virtual scrolling on my touchpad: so frickin hard to live without! Shall I have to buy a mouse?
* the menu item separators are now inset, like the aqua gel buttons: very slick, everything looks more solid, and less stuck on as an afterthought.
* iChat AV's voice feature is so great. I don't have video, while it would be cool, I'd have to look interested when talking to my parents (and not surf the web
* All the updates to the finder and system put together means that aside from the dock not having multiple tabs or some such, I can finally use my computer as efficiently and _intuitively_ as I could ever wish:
- expose lets me see my desktop quickly for my commonly used items
- find in the finder window finally is usable and useful
- with the places holder on the left, it's somehow a lot easier to use the column view and jump to required place than when the icons were up in the toolbar (separation of concerns perhaps?
- everything just fits, like it was a handcrafted piece of woodwork: Beautiful =)
* This has been mentioned, but I'll mention it again: milk and brushed metal: I like both of them: in isolation. Thrown all together my machine now kinda looks like a badly designed KDE theme... all these different ways of viewing things mushed together. Even the volume level in iChat AV is out of place. As I say, they all look great in isolation, so hopefully the full release will meld these elements a bit better!
* To reply to themexican: I agree that customisability is lacking, especially if apple keeps changing its own ideas of how its computer should look.
* Also agree with themexican that it would be very cool if the action menu could auto send files like screensavers, etc to the right folder, but remember there's more than one "right folder"; ie: all users or just for this one, not that that couldn't be overcome of course!
* Disagree: Finder windows still take up too much screen real estate. If apple used small scrollbars it would save a significant # of pixels per window.
Make scrollbars too thin and they get hard to use: they take up space, but they are necessarily large so they are easy to use.
* Dock should act more like dragthing/tabbed windows pre-X. Or at least it should allow the use of separators a la toolbar
* Scrolling in Safari is much nicer. Smooth and all
* themexican: My suggestion to enhance the multiple user experience would be to have an easy way for families to share iApp libraries between users.
Hell yes!!
My Panther experience. (Score:3, Interesting)
The only other odd thing was that I couldn't find the drive/folder encrytion feature. It was talked about at the WWDC but not shown and I don't believe it has been implemented yet. Oddly, GNU Chess was also missing. I grabbed the source code from Apple and used the new XCode to compile it and it worked flawlessly. XCode is great. Two clicks and I had a working binary. Very nicely integrated and well thought out. Kudos to Apple.
Bugs aside, Panther is an improvement. The only reservation I have is that Apple expects users to shell out another $129 to get it. Yearly OS updates at $129 are not going to be popular. I know Apple spends a lot on OS development but if they keep going back to the same well, the well will run dry.