Very favourable, my first impressions!
Getting Panther inside took most of the past week's Mac use, but that was partly because my ISP has had problems which saw me without Net access for much of five days, and mainly because it's the first time since I rallied to Apple that I've
totally wiped a machine and started from scratch, rethinking everything.
With the new cat came the hour to reconsider the size of my partitions, what programmes I use and which have become redundant with the development of Mac OS X, and what I now
do with the computer, which has changed a great deal in the past couple of years.
Music and other arts now play a much bigger part in my life again than they have done, for instance, and this led me to dispense with two now unnecessary partitions and make the best use of my hard disk space.
So, while I've been on OS 10.3 for a little over a week, the past few hours have been my first real chance for a look under the hood, as well as on the desktop.
Under Jaguar, I used FruitMenu a great deal as one way of getting at my applications fast, and I may restore it, but for now I'm more than happy with an uncluttered dock and with what James Thomson has most recently done to
DragThing (at VT) as a terrific launcher and switcher, once set up, which takes time.
Exposé? Yes. Fabulous, useful and great to have at the disposal of three F keys.
The much revamped "at a glance" Finder? A major improvement.
X11? I've only just started digging, but it's looking very good, relatively easy to work with, especially compared with the hodgepodge I'd compiled on Jaguar mainly for the investigation and use of Open Source software.
The all-in-one Activity Monitor? Again, an improvement in my eyes.
The handling of PDF files? Ditto, along with the new features of Preview.
Shortcomings? Frankly, I've yet to find anything substantial to moan about, though I'm sure I will soon enough!
But the sheer swiftness of Panther (on my eMac 700 MHz, 768 MB) is admirable, and that from a guy who prided himself on not being a boring speed freak...
Apart from the overall system speed, I really appreciate an end to sluggishness in such things as the Help Viewer. I use contextual menus a very great deal, occasionally by accident. One of my most frequent mistakes was to trigger Help when I didn't want it and have to wait for so long to dispense with it again.
The Mail app is faster too, while I have an impression -- but just an impression, I've not timed it -- that iDisk access is swifter as well as easier. This matters to me, since my iDisk is used almost daily as the place where I send the pics for my 'blog. And for one or two other things.
Since I was among those who finally decided to let Apple have my money for .Mac and the storage space, I do like to make the best use of it...
