Panther Impressions

Going in, I had mixed feelings about Panther. Of the supposedly 150 new features there weren't all that many that I was really interested in. Mainly Expose, better performance and XCode, I was also interested in seeing if the Finder was really that much better.

Expose is cooool. It's exactly what the Mac has needed, window management has been a real pain. In particular Expose combined with gestures on my TouchStream keyboard is a thing of beauty. I bound the Expose triggers to two finger + thumb gestures for the left hand. Tap to show all windows, pinch together to show windows for the current app, and spread to show the desktop. In particular the show desktop gesture is cool as it feels like you're flicking the windows out of the way. This also finally makes the desktop actually useful. Prior to Expose I never put anything on the desktop as there was never an easy way to access it. I used to keep a folder called Workspace that I set to icon view and used the way you're supposed to use the desktop. Now with Expose I moved Workspace into the desktop. This is great as it gives me much more real estate for my workspace on my two monitor setup and Expose makes accessing it trivial. Expose has changed the way I work and that's a good thing. It isn't perfect though, there should be a way to have it show all window names at one time so you don't have to pass over each window. Expose also points out why we need higher resolution displays. Interface scalability is just getting started and I really want to see features like being able to scale any individual window while still being able to use it normally. With current displays you lose some visual quality, but as pixel density increases we should see all kinds of usability improvements from this type of thing.

Performance was one of the much talked about improvements in Panther and on that count I'm impressed with how well it delivers. I'm not sure how much is from OS improvements or specific application improvements, but I do know that in general things feel faster. Some apps like Mail are dramatically faster. Jaguar wasn't exactly slow, or at least I didn't think so until running Panther. Now it will probably feel quite a bit different. Apple has definitely been doing a good job in this area.

XCode was the final thing I was really looking forward to. It's a dramatic improvement over Project Builder, but it also seems to suffer from a fair number of bugs. One in particular is with smart groups, they lose their contents every time you save a file. The concept is great though and I was really hoping to see that kind of feature built into the Finder. I haven't really put XCode through its paces yet, but other then bugs most of what I've seen so far is good. I've even been using it for script editing in place of JEdit. We'll see if I stick with it going forward.

What has been a little disappointing is the new Finder. It was billed as being user centric, compared to the old Finder which was too computer centric. So far I have to say I don't really see it. Yes it is better then the old Finder, however the improvements to me seem fairly minor. I was really hoping to see something like smart folders, better full content searching of files and some new file management concepts like piles. I knew none of this was really coming, but I wanted to see first hand exactly how much they improved the finder. Most of what's there now is just maturation of what was there before. There's definitely nothing wrong with that, but the way we store data on personal computers is desperately in need of some rethinking. Microsoft is making some progress with WinFS, but I still don't think they're going far enough and that's years away. Apple needs to do something too, and I all I have to say is think different, err ... sorry I mean think XML.

That out of the way, the new Finder is better. The sidebar is a minor improvement over putting folders on the toolbar, but it's a welcome change, Labels are a feature that I didn't really care about, but it turns out I do actually use them. It's nice that the network icon finally does something, and working with network servers seems to have better reliability. The type down searching of files is good, but I desperately want that feature to look inside the files rather then just at their names. Other then that the Finder is pretty much the same as before.

One very good thing about the finder rework, is that it was carried over to the save/open dialogs. All I can say is thank you. The old dialogs were pretty bad and made the annoying feature of saving files just that much more painful. The design still isn't perfect, but it's much better and probably better then on any other platform.

Most of the rest of the new features in Panther are either behind the scenes (like Python 2.3 being included) or features that I don't care about(i.e. Fontbook).

I did have a major glitch with a Firewire drive, seems Firewire has a number of problems on Panther. I have two firewire drives and I usually keep one turned off. The first time I turned it on under Panther it didn't mount and the other Firewire drive disappeared too. It didn't lose any data, but it did force a manual power off since the finder locked up. After rebooting it's worked fine since so I don't know what happened.

Overall it turns out I really like Panther, most of the improvements are little things but they add up to a much more polished experience. That is really what an OS upgrade should bring. The one major new feature for me was Expose and I think that's great. I'm also looking forward to spending more time with the new dev tools, there's some real improvement there. My one serious complaint is that Apple really does need to start offering upgrade pricing, I think $129 is a little unfair to existing users.

Posted by Kimbro Staken