Panther is worth it. Period.

[TigerPRO]

I've seem more than a few threads on this Question. So lets settle it once and for all.

Panther is a huge upgrade!
Well worth the money.

Don't be fooled that those couple cool features they've added are all that's there. It's got allot more. Just mine the depths of the Panther website and you will all be surprised what's there they are not making a big deal about. Because I think there are lots of little (but important) features you don't hear about from reading the front-line stories. When you just skim the major features (exposé, user switching) and call it a wrap, it does seem like a wimpy upgrade. But they did allot more under the hood of Panther.

Here's some good stuff I found:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/compare.html

This list is very interesting.

http://www.apple.com/macosx/techspecs/

If you go here, look at all the links under "Included Applications" and "Featured Technologies". In those pages, on the right hand side, all the news features in Panther are listed for them. I certainly found some cool stuff I didn't know about.

 

[FredAkbar]

Thanks, I liked that first list, I hadn't seen that one before. I remember reading a list by Apple that looked like that, about a year ago, except the 3 columns were Jaguar, 10.1, and OS 9 (makes sense).

I'm eagerly awaiting my copy--shipped today, arrives on Friday (I hope!)

 

[Thanatoast]

sweet. before i just wanted it. now i must *have* it.

 

[Giaguara]

if you know what you want and how to build programs you are fine in jaguar too.

the 1st thing that made me want panther: backgroubnd picture possibility in terminal.

2st: fast user switch. may be handy when there are more than 1 mac and mac user in the same house oir office.


but i could do without them.

i dont mind getting panther though - i want to see how its for programming etc. besides i get it for 19,95 $.

 

[tomf87]

Out of all of it, I'm eager to see how they pushed the Quartz Extreme load onto the GPU instead of the CPU. My iMac is slow at resizing windows and such. It seems the GUI takes the most load. If they fix this, my iMac may be a screaming machine, as it was in OS9.

 

[whooleytoo]

I'm interested in 'Cusom Keyboard Remapping'. Any idea what that is?

Also "Scriptable Image Processing Service", AFAIK that allows you to do batch image processing just by dropping images into a folder, quite a nifty feature.

 

[MIADolFan]

It sounds all cool and all...but will panther support all the newer versions of UDF. I hate being fored to use my USB cable to download from my digital camera. Thats why I bought a cd camera to begin with.

 

[Mason]

Here is an excellent review of Panther in today's NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/23/t...00&en=81e858bada35d411&ei=5062&partner=GOOGLE

 

[edStar]

I think I'm sold on all the major features, but like you pointed out the lesser known ones are just as important.

Being a first time mac owner, I really am always surprised at the way Apple inovates its software and hardware.

I hope it has better support for net surfing behind proxies. Something I've had *some* trouble with, but I think it has a lot to do with being networked to a Windows PC.

 

[VicMacs]

worth the upgrade

expose boosts your productivity because you dont waste time changing windows... speed is significantly increased, response to commandands are quicker, user switching is a breeze, its much more solid smooth...

 

[eallison]

"hardware accelerated imaging"

Anyone notice the "hardware accelerated imaging" in the table? Not in Jag. Any idea what it is?

 

[tomf87]

Re: "hardware accelerated imaging"

Originally posted by eallison
Anyone notice the "hardware accelerated imaging" in the table? Not in Jag. Any idea what it is?

Yes, I posted earlier about this and it looks like it offloads the load of Quartz Extreme onto the GPU. From my earlier post:

Originally posted by tomf87
Out of all of it, I'm eager to see how they pushed the Quartz Extreme load onto the GPU instead of the CPU. My iMac is slow at resizing windows and such. It seems the GUI takes the most load. If they fix this, my iMac may be a screaming machine, as it was in OS9.

 

[zyuzin4]

share printer with windows

I'm pretty sure Jaguar had that feature of sharing printers with windows. I remember having to plug my printer into my imac and share to the windows machines because my imac couldnt print to windows printers. Maybe I did something funky

edit: nevermind the next section says Jaguar can share to windows users

 

[ChronoIMG]

Originally posted by tomf87
Out of all of it, I'm eager to see how they pushed the Quartz Extreme load onto the GPU instead of the CPU. My iMac is slow at resizing windows and such. It seems the GUI takes the most load. If they fix this, my iMac may be a screaming machine, as it was in OS9.

This is the one feature I'm really looking forward to. The increased QE speed is going to do wonders for everyone including application developers.

 

[swpalmer]

Quartz Extreme was ALWAYS about getting the GPU to do the work instead of the CPU.. that was the whole point of the "Extreme" regular Quartz is the CPU stuff.

Printing to windows via smb didn't work without Gimp Print (free), which is now included. There is also the trick off holding option when clicking on Add Printer to get more options in jag.

I tried last night to print to a printer shared on a Linux box and it failed miserably - printer showed up but printing hung... I hope that is fixed in Panther so I can print from my laptop via airport.

 

[VladDracul]

According to that list, there aren't any improvements on how FTP is handled by the file server and/or Finder.

If that is the case, I'm somewhat disappointed. I've had Jaguar crash on me about 5 or 6 times total. All those crashes ocurred while I was doing some sort of file sharing via FTP; which means that FTP is a major source of instability in Mac OS X and shoud have been addressed by Panther.

 

[daveL]

Originally posted by VladDracul
According to that list, there aren't any improvements on how FTP is handled by the file server and/or Finder.

If that is the case, I'm somewhat disappointed. I've had Jaguar crash on me about 5 or 6 times total. All those crashes ocurred while I was doing some sort of file sharing via FTP; which means that FTP is a major source of instability in Mac OS X and shoud have been addressed by Panther.

I noticed that in the table as well, but I can tell you it is *much* improved. Under Jag, I had to use IE to d/l Panther seeds from the ADC site. With Panther, I was able to d/l Xcode from ADC using Safari. It mounted the ftp site on the desktop, and I was able to drag-n-drop multiple disk image segments without a hitch.

 

[zach]

One thing jumps out at me here:

Custom Keyboard Remapping.

Don't laugh at me here, but I actually tried to learn Apple's incredibally hard method of remapping keyboards to make a (please, don't laugh) L33T keyboard.

I'll have so much fun with this...

::grins maniacally::

 

[sososowhat]

iPhoto in Panther

The table says iPhoto's been improved. Anyone know in what ways? How's the performance with large numbers of photos (I've got ~10,000 and even on my 2.0 DP G5 with 3.5G ram it's slow).

 

[skymaXimus]

Authentication on wake from sleep

Authentication on wake from sleep
Man they should advertise that feature! No more trying to get the screen saver to come on before sleep.

 

[etoiles]

expose will be a god-sent for all us 12"pb users out there, that is for sure.

I'll fork over $130 depending on what improvements have been made to overall speed and iApps...we'll see...tomorrow !

 

[encro]

Originally posted by whooleytoo
I'm interested in 'Cusom Keyboard Remapping'. Any idea what that is?

Jaguar has it also I assume if its the same thing renamed. Its called KeyBindings

/Library/KeyBindings/

 

[iEric]

Its true, and the best thing is, not the improved apps and the extras, BUT THE SPEED IMPROVEMENT!! ITS SO MUCH FASTER!
Start up times probably cut in 1/2 or 2/3!!