Pondering Panther
Apple is making OS X even better, building on their shrewd move of using the open source FreeBSD as the system's foundation. If you're a Mac fan too busy and/or nontechnical to read up on the details, here's my very cursory summary of the Ars Technica review of Mac OS X 10.3, a.k.a. Panther:
Change your password!
The password security is much better in Panther than earlier versions of OS X. Unfortunately, an upgrade won't give you the better security automatically: You have to change your password. (Technical readers: They weren't using shadow passwords before! I know. Well, at least they've fixed it.)
Everything's faster!
As they point out in the review, this may be a first for a commercial operating system: Everything will run faster on the same hardware than with previous releases! (Techies: This is mostly thanks to better optimizations by GCC 3. Oh, and let's not talk about Slowlaris...)
Lost a window? Exposé!
A nifty usability principle I learned of years ago on usability guru Bruce Tognazzini's AskTog site is that the easiest place to push the mouse pointer is one of the four corners of the screen. Pretty obvious on reflection, of course: The pointer slides along a side, top, or bottom edge, so if you're rolling in the general direction of a corner, you'll get there. Apparently "Fitt's Law". Well, Panther's new Exposé feature takes advantage of this principle (finally!) to make your windows easier to find when the screen is cluttered. Reading Tog's description of this feature made me realize something that may be useful to mention: You may want to turn off the corner-activation of Exposé for the upper-left corner, to keep it from messing up access to the "Apple" menu. 'Nuff said; seeing is comprehending.
Just for J: Finder now stays within a user's folder.
Sounds like this would bug the heck out of me, but I know somebody who seemed very flustered when Finder let her wander all over the huge new Unix filesystem underlying OS X... and it apparently flustered a lot of Mac users, so Apple changed Finder to get sort of "stuck" within the bounds of the user's personal folder.
This update to OS X ought to make a lot more Windows users envious of the Mac. Unix and Linux users have no excuse: A new Mac should slide very comfortably into our largely open source environments, for those who want the nice graphical desktop!
Change your password!
The password security is much better in Panther than earlier versions of OS X. Unfortunately, an upgrade won't give you the better security automatically: You have to change your password. (Technical readers: They weren't using shadow passwords before! I know. Well, at least they've fixed it.)
Everything's faster!
As they point out in the review, this may be a first for a commercial operating system: Everything will run faster on the same hardware than with previous releases! (Techies: This is mostly thanks to better optimizations by GCC 3. Oh, and let's not talk about Slowlaris...)
Lost a window? Exposé!
A nifty usability principle I learned of years ago on usability guru Bruce Tognazzini's AskTog site is that the easiest place to push the mouse pointer is one of the four corners of the screen. Pretty obvious on reflection, of course: The pointer slides along a side, top, or bottom edge, so if you're rolling in the general direction of a corner, you'll get there. Apparently "Fitt's Law". Well, Panther's new Exposé feature takes advantage of this principle (finally!) to make your windows easier to find when the screen is cluttered. Reading Tog's description of this feature made me realize something that may be useful to mention: You may want to turn off the corner-activation of Exposé for the upper-left corner, to keep it from messing up access to the "Apple" menu. 'Nuff said; seeing is comprehending.
Just for J: Finder now stays within a user's folder.
Sounds like this would bug the heck out of me, but I know somebody who seemed very flustered when Finder let her wander all over the huge new Unix filesystem underlying OS X... and it apparently flustered a lot of Mac users, so Apple changed Finder to get sort of "stuck" within the bounds of the user's personal folder.
This update to OS X ought to make a lot more Windows users envious of the Mac. Unix and Linux users have no excuse: A new Mac should slide very comfortably into our largely open source environments, for those who want the nice graphical desktop!