First Post! -Friday, October 24, 2003 -7:43 pm-
I received my copy of Panther mid-day today, and I've had my install up and running on my laptop since about an hour before the official release for my time zone. As far as I can tell, it's kind of a mixed bag. Some of the stuff is great. Expose, Fast User Switching, and better security all are major pluses. However, there are some major setbacks. It feels slower. I'm not sure why this is. Most of the pre-release reviews remarked on how much of a speed boost there was, so I suspect that something is not optimized in my system. The new Finder flat out sucks. Since OS X Public Beta, Apple has been moving further and further away from the UI model for the pre-OS X Finder. Personally, I find the new Finder much less intuitive and much slower to use. The process of learning OS X has been one of coming to understand how my expectations for using the computer had been broken. The new interface is much more like Windows XP, a format I find frustrating. Hopefully, I'll come to adapt to it. The switch was pretty smooth. So far, I've only noticed three programs that broke. First, and expectedly, ClearDock broke. I don't think there has been an update yet that didn't break the hacks people apply to the dock. Second, and only a small surprise, uControl broke. uControl does key remapping and a few other things. Since it's a non-Apple-sanction kext, it isn't at all surprising that enough changed to break it. Finally, and quite surprisingly, Excalibur broke. Excalibur is a UNIX-compatible spell checker. I have no idea why it broke, but suspect it can be fixed by reinstalling the application. Hmmm, I can't launch X11, so I guess that broke too. I have that on disk with me (I'm currently in BFE and have no Net access), so I'll try reinstalling in the morning. Good news is: no crashes and nothing OS-level is broken.