Panther: 24 Hours Later -Saturday, October 25, 2003 -9:21 pm-
I'm starting to find some of the less flashy features that are still somewhat amazing. The Fast File Search lets you run a search from within a Finder window. It starts the search in real time and refines the search as you add more characters to your query. It's default behavior is to search all local disks, a function for which I think the Find command still takes the cake. More useful is the Selection setting, where it searches amongst the current folder (recursively) or amongst the currently selected items. This makes it easy to open your Documents folder and find all of the .doc files with the word fish in their name. Unfortunately, I think this feature will confuse new users greatly. As soon as you enter a character in the search field, it begins sorting results. If you delete the characters from the search field, it still shows only those files that were a result of the query. You have to click the little X at the end of the search field to exit search mode. I suspect this will lead to a lot of users being confused because they see nothing in the search field, but aren't seeing all of their files.
Second is the Action pop-up menu. It's an icon in the Finder tool bar that duplicates the menu accessed by right-clicking (my method of use) on a file or folder. However, there are two additions. First, labels are back, which, to me, is marginally useful. Second, and most usefully, you can now create zip archives from the pop-up menu. This is really freaking convenient. It would be nice if you could set it to create tar.gz, but I'll go with what I can get.
Well, now that I've got net access again (ughghhehhghghhhhhh... sweet internet), I've been able to fix all of the apps that Panther broke other than uControl. Turns out uControl relied on a bug in the gcc 3.1 compiler. Panther was compiled on the gcc 3.3 compiler, and therefore, uControl can no longer get into the system. It's kinda surprising that uControl doesn't break Panther, poking around in it's innards like that.