Panther First Experiences

Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null

The total installation time, from rebooting Pomum to kick it off to now, starting Panther for the first time, was less than an hour. About 50 minutes to be picky about it. And the first boot does seem quicker than Jaguar did.

Okay, we're not done yet. Only now did it ask for CD 2 to install software, so add a few more minutes if you count that as part of the OS install ... Nobody counts running Windows Update as part of installing Windows though, regardless of how mandatory it is, so I think I won't count this either.

The installation program started using Panther's new cleaner Aqua (that's what they call the OS X look) interface right away. I seemed to recall the Apple logo in the top left corner being in the new look on screenshots, but here it's as blue as always. And it is actually in the manual's screenshots as well, so I guess I was mistaken or something :-) ...

Inside the Panther box was a short installation manual, a "Welcome to Panther" booklet, license agreement, an AppleCare folder, everyone's favourite software coupons and four CDs; three for Panther installation and one for Xcode. The first CD is the OS itself and core things like Java. The second CD seems to be software (iLife and the like) and language files. And I'm guessing the last one may be some more languages and, above all, printer drivers. Installing all the printer driver files would have needed an additional 400-something megabytes all by itself, so I skipped it since I don't have a printer ...

Okay, installation's still going on, and now I'm on CD 3. It's installing X11 from it and that seems to be about all that's left to do, judging by the progress bar. Soon time to test-drive!

14:54

We're in! And everything that wasn't meant to be updated seems to be exactly where I left it!

Performing another restart, to get to play with the USB drivers (I've heard the default mouse speeds and stuff are going to be better now) and check again what I think about startup speed. Yep, it is notably faster. Less time spent on the grey screen, and even less on the blue one (and I thought that one was fast before). Might be taking a little longer between the desktop appearing and the user getting control, but I'm not sure. I've never been much of a restarter anyway :-) ...

A natural first stop: opening finder and going straight to trying to view a pdf file in the updated preview app to see if it's really as fast as they said and showed. Yeah it is! You never know for sure until you try it yourself, but now it feels like browsing just any text file rather than the slowness I've come to associate with pdf.

Next stop: Exposé! Haha, speedy! Let me open some more windows here ...

*Mad giggles*

*Cough* ... That's just too much fun. And it doesn't just resize everything to the same size or fit it on a grid either, it makes a nice little jigsaw-like arrangement where everything gets as much space as possible. If there's enough space it doesn't bother to resize at all. And it's fast too. I wouldn't expect Windows to do anything this graphical this fast ...

Oh and of course it doesn't do anything silly such as pausing video, making it stutter or anything else. It just resizes it all magically ...

16:36

Just found the first non-neat visual effect in Panther. Finder windows with controls displayed have the brushed metal look, windows with controls hidden don't. Switch between them using the pill-shaped button on the top right and the window changes look and size in a rather jarring way. No smooth transition there, just a straight change.

Upgrading, unsurprisingly, overwrote my customised icon for Pomum itself. Putting it back was the same procedure as it was in Jaguar, so no big deal. What's not immediately notable is that it's now quite a bit harder to get to see that icon than it was before. The only place I could find it at first was the "Go" menu in Finder. And then I discovered that the computer can be set to show in the top-left pane of the Finder window as well, but if you don't turn that on you won't come across the icon very often. Still, I keep wondering why Apple can't customise it, or at least let you choose more easily. It just feels wrong to have an incorrect computer type showing up there :-) ...