That's right, I said Jaguar, not Panther. Looking back at last year's post, Industrie Jaguar, I thought it would be nice to revisit some of my thoughts on Jaguar and whether my expectations (high or low) were filled, surpassed, or fell short.
Command Tab in Mac OS 10.0 and 10.1, command-tab would cycle through the dock in the order that applications appeared in the dock. Mac OS 10.2 tweaked that functionality so that the first command-tab would go to the previously used application, and then would cycle through the dock. Also, you could no longer hit "command-tab" and then "command-shift" to go backwards - in 10.2 you had to hit command-shift-tab. I got used to the changes pretty quickly. Somewhere along the way (I don't know if it existed before 10.2 - I think it did), you could also hit 'q' to quit applications as you cycled over them in command-tab, and 'h' to hide them.
Windows Networking - when Jaguar came out, I needed it. But my need for it disappeared shortly after. It was nice that it was there though - enough to get some work done.
Integrated FTP in the Finder was a letdown. It's read only. WebDAV support seems to work nice, at least against Apache and mod_dav. We've been using this for a project/file server recently and have had few problems (WebDAV support was there from 10.0 or 10.1.
Bash, Python, and Terminal all nice to have when you need them. I still work with these things more on a server than on my desktop, but it's still nice to fire up a Python interpreter to test something out.
No more Happy Mac - the startup screen was replaced by a more professional and stylish grey Apple on, um, a grey background. It looks nice. However, we recently acquired a Mac Plus in good condition at the office, and seeing the Happy Mac (on one of the originals) was a nice experience. But this is one of the things I've learned to live without. I understand why Apple changed this - Apple is the brand now, more so than the Mac, and making the startup screen (seen less frequently these days) more professional probably helps their general image.
Performance on my home iMac (DV SE/400) has actually been fairly good, especially once I updated the RAM (which I admit I did more for a game than for anything else). But even before then, some of the initial performance hiccups I had seemed to have gone away. Or I stopped noticing them. It's hard to know for sure sometimes.
Help Viewer was always a mixed experience... But it was better than the previous HTML based ones.
Sherlock 3 was used occasionally by me, usually for movie times. If I used this application more, I would definitely put the money into a license for Watson.
Find in the Finder was very nicely done, although I still want the ability to have saved queries!. It wasn't super-fast, but it was much better than the Sherlock 2 File-Find service in 10.0 and 10.1.
The Open-With Menu option in the Finder was the best new feature. Since I deal with a lot of strange little audio tools, the "open with" command has been very useful for opening a file into one strange little tool after another, regardless of its creator.
Services in the Finder - I didn't use this as much as I thought I would, but it still came in handy whenever I needed to mail a file to someone. Most Services tend to prefer text input anyways. But it's nice that it's there.
Integrated Scanning with Image Capture is nice - scanning (in general) was not a pleasant experience before 10.2
iChat - I was initially skeptical of it, but now I always have it on, as does everybody in the office and a few other friends besides. A simple chat client with no advertising, no bizarre features, was really quite nice - more so than many of us (in the office) were expecting.
Overall, Jaguar's been a nice system to run for the past year. It never let me down (even during the 10.2.8 update debacle). The only time I had to reinstall it was when the hard drive on my iMac went bad (and even that was salvageable). It brought some cool new technologies to the table, especially the auto-discovery network technology Rendezvous. But mostly - it made Mac OS X usable for the masses.
It will be interesting to do a similar review in a years time (give or take) when 10.4 is bound to come out, to see how well Panther ended up working out for me.
Dave Hyatt has posted a list of what's new in Safari 1.1. Unfortunately, Safari 1.1 appears to be for Mac OS X 10.3 only (visiting the Safari page at Apple.com lists 1.0 as the current release). Is this how it's going to be? Safari and WebKit are great products. But there's an eerie feeling here, as Microsoft has said that Internet Explorer will essentially only be updated with new releases of Windows.
Granted, it's barely a day after the release of Panther, but if there are fixes and refinements to Safari's HTML capabilities - shouldn't those who choose not to pay the $129 price for Panther get those fixes too?
Bundling is such an interesting issue, with Apple's Mail application being the strangest of them all. The original NeXT Mail application was a pretty serious feature of NeXTStep, and maybe this is just carrying over into Mac OS X's marketing and planning. But I find it interesting that changes to the Mail application are sold as significant new features for Panther. I don't mind it - it's nice to have a decent Mail application as part of Panther's price. But what of those who don't want to use it, electing to use Entourage or MailSmith or any other mail application instead? (I used Entourage up to Mac OS X 10.2, as OS X's mail application was unusable for me up to that point). There's still a little rift in the Mac OS community about Apple's Sherlock 3 (bundled with OS X since 10.2) versus the similar (and faster and better and earlier) Watson from Karelia.
While I've already moved 2/3 of my machines to Panther, here's hoping that Safari 1.1 can find its way back to Jaguar.
Ever since I first used a Mac in the mid eighties, and its amazing Commodore 64 knockoff GEOS (a working GUI in 64k, on a 1 Mhz processor, and the slowest floppy drive known to man), I've been fascinated by the power and potential of graphical operating systems.
With the release of Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther", I thought it would be a good time to take a general view at mass operating systems over the years, and take some time to think about where we are in the evolution of human-computer interaction. To support that, there's a new category here at Industrie Toulouse, OS (de)Evolution. It's already populated with some entries from the archives, and more will find their way in there, I'm sure.
I call it (de)Evolution because our steps forward and back are nearly impossible to track now. Some great ideas have slowly been lost over the years, other ideas are working out fine. So who has the best drive, ideas, and platform for new direction? Apple? Microsoft? The Open Source community? I plan to investigate this and more in the upcoming OS (de)Evolution articles.