What Panther Has Fixed
AppleMatters has written six pieces on “What Panther Should Fix”. After seeing the prerelease information that Apple released this week at the World Wide Developers conference (WWDC) 2003 in San Francisco we can’t help but think that someone at Apple is reading us. Or great minds thing alike.
Swollen and delusional egos aside lets take a look at what we suggested as compared to what Apple has, so far, said is coming in Panther.
Shut Me Down
Hopefully the rewritten elements of the core operating system and finder will allow OS X to shut down properly. Fast user switching should also make logging out and back in a less arduous task.
Give Me Some Speed
There is nothing in Apple’s press releases talking about speed which isn’t a surprise with all the focus this past week on the G5 processor. We can only hope that the improvements to Panther combined with the G5 will lead to a faster user experience. The only remaining question will be how fast Panther will run on the G3 and G4 processors which will all use now and continue to be sold by Apple.
Duplicate Directories
Nothing in Apple’s documentation of Panther discusses the issue of duplicate directories. I suspect that Apple cannot solve this problem simply because of the way Unix works.
Font, Fonts, Fonts!!
Victory! There is a big smile on my face with the introduction of Font Book. Of course the fine folks over at Extensis and DiamondSoft must be less than happy. They have now been Watsoned by Apple. For graphic designers Font Book is a huge step forward. Having a coherent front end to the messiness of fonts in OS X will be a huge improvement. Thank you, Apple!
Application Installs
Like the duplicate directory issue this is one that is difficult for Apple to fix. From a user standpoint this is unfortunate. Installing applications in OS X has become more complex than OS 9. And uninstalling can be a nightmare. It would be great if Apple could create an Application install and uninstall process that was uniform regardless of the vendor.
Broken Windows
This article received some great comments thanks to readers like you. The suggestion readers gave are one’s Apple should heed. That said there is nothing in Apple’s documentation to indicate that windowing will finally be consistent. From a visual standpoint the metal interface that has come to pervade the Mac is coming to the finder. This will undoubtedly annoy some and please others. I don’t really mind either way as long as the user experience is consistent. If a window is metallic in the Finder it should be metallic in Photoshop. Something tells me this won’t happen immediately.
What do you think? Are you excited about the changes in Panther? Is it worthy of another cat or should it have just been called 10.2.8?
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Comments
Printing
OSX printing support is terrible.
The print menus are not intuitive, the drivers are basic at best and unless you want to print letters on a laserprinter OSX is not the OS to use. This must change fast or creative professionals will start to leave the platform. If a printer can do edge to edge printing the OS should allow this and excuses that its all the printer manufacturers fault are not useful.
Chalk me up as one who WILL NOT use the new Finder as it stands, with the metal look and especially the “Places” sidebar. If there’s no hack available to kill that stuff, I’ll stay with 10.2
when I look at Windows XP I feel like the powerusers are being treated as toddlers in a playpen. the same came to my mind when I saw the new finder in Panther. pls. OS-designers out there, don´t treat the experienced one like novices leaving them frustrated even though there are now more buttons and colors to play w/ than ever before but leaving the user more and more powerless and not of age…
and if you Apple engineers do read this site and the user comments, pls. keep on reading....
there is one special feature that always frustated me as an early adopter of MacOS X and that was the behavior of the savepanel .... I am a 10-year long user of NeXT and NEXTstep and was able to click on the filenames of other files w/in the savepanel which are named similar to the name I wanted to use for the just about to be saved file.... but every file in MacOS X save-panel is grayed out to protect the computer novice to loose somthing ...
that frustrtated me so that I stayed w/ 9 for a long time, and just recently switched to 10 on my 1 Ghz Powerbook… (which is still able to boot into 9..... the only thing missing for me to abandon 9 completely is the a german speech package for IBMs ViaVoice 3.x for MacOS X....
thanx
stefan j.
I agree, printing is still the weakest part of OS X. Which is weird considering Apple is obviously pitching at the creative production audiences.
But even in Microsoft Word, there’s a known bug that if your text is too close to the bottom of the page, Word will simply cut it off when it prints—in the middle of a line if necessary.
Apple needs to fix printing in 10.3.
I agree with others that the Printing in MacOS X sucks. It is SLOW. Also, it does not support some VERY useful MacOS 9 (and prior versions) features. The Print Window does not offer any scheduling features such as the “Spool as HOLD/NORMAL/URGENT” where you can control if the Printout is not available for Printing (HOLD) and where it will be queued in relation to other jobs (NORMAL - After all other jobs already on the Queue and URGENT - Ahead of the first NORMAL job while after all other URGENT jobs). This reflects the lack of Scheduling Support in Print Center (even though PC supports HOLD, you must activate it manually by selecting a Job in PC and clicking HOLD - You can not add the Job already HELD).
Then there is the lack of tracking in PC - No Display of Number of Pages or Number of copies for spooled jobs (something that MacOS 9 Print Monitor displays) and no status of a job being printed except to acknowledge that it is being printed (ie: No “Now Printing Page X of Y” like in MacOS 9 Print Monitor).
It is my impression that MacOS X SERVER’s Print Server supports all of these MacOS 9 features so Apple is willing to deliver this support if you plunk down $500 to buy Server while saying that those who pay only for MacOS X “Lite"/"Client" have no need for these “Fancy” (and previously supported) features.
I hope that like with “Labels” that Jobs will finally be willing to deliver these other MacOS 9 features in the MacOS 10.3.0 version “for the rest of us” (not just the Server Crowd).
Printing is a SERIOUS problem in OS X… Filemaker, for example. I have always been able to scan a form into FM and define fields over the form and use FM to fill it out… and then print it! Now, whatever format the scanned background image is in, it PRINTS at 72dpi… useless! totally useless! In fact, this one problem just FORCED me to buy a windoze laptop to fill in forms that i MUST fill in… and there is windoze software to do this! really stupid Apple/Filemaker! I was GOING to buy a Powerbook instead - but not now! (and yes I know about Virtual PC… way too slow!) - keith
I want faster access to shared volumes. Bring back “recent volumes”. Ejecting shared volumes is buggy too.
Oh, Speaking of Filemaker. As of 10.2 you can’t develop layouts in FMP 3 or 4. That’s pathetic. I won’t spend thousands to upgrade just to fix Apple’s bug.
I saw a comment about printing. Printing is now more like windows - set up a printer, and then from that same set up area you can cancel jobs and what not.
I dunno, beats the hell out of the Choser!
As for the windowing scheme. In the Aqua Human Interface Guidelines for 10.2 (Jaguar), I believe there is mention of the metal theme being used solely for single-use apps, like iChat, iTunes, iPhoto, etc. This makes sense. An application like Photoshop has no core window that it functions off of. It has winlettes (the tool palettes) which have never looked like the regular windows, and it has document windows which can maintain the current non-metal look and that’d be fine. It, at the very least, differentiates them from application and maybe even dialog windows.
I haven’t found ejecting shared volumes to be problematic. I do wish you could get Win98 volumes to mount on your desktop via file sharing though. I’ve had no success with that. But, I agree with Jim Babb (any relation to Seth?) that access to shared volumes is slow. At least it’s thorough!
OK. Now onto Metal in the Finder… It’s fine. In fact, heck, turn every file dialog and similar feature of the OS into an iTunes-like window and I’ll be very pleased. Have none of you noticed the ease with which you can manage content in iTunes? The Library, your play lists, purchased music, CDs, and more… It’s all so easy to move things around and keep track of. Why NOT do this to the Finder - which is just the name of the means for managing files on your drive.
Back to printing comments: OK. I will agree that queing and knowing the progress are funky. And it is a little slow getting started, but that’s it. I have an HP DeskJet 3820 and once it gets going it churns stuff out nice and fast. OS 9 had that painful delay where if you tried to do stuff, your printer stopped until you were done (well, only certain actions caused this) and I haven’t noticed this in X.
Overall I am excited about Panther so long as it keeps up stability. That’s the most important aspect of OS X to me. Whenever something crashes, it either auto-quits and tells me so, or I have to force quit. No restarts, no zapping P-RAM or trashing prefs… None of that crap. I also look forward to Font Book.
What I want is for Apple to make AppleWorks a real piece of software and not just some half-assed excuse for a multi-purpose word processor. Is that so much to ask? They’re already spurning and spiting MS at every turn (and DigiDesign, and Adobe, and who else… Hmmm), so why not create a by-Apple alternative to Office? It worked with Safari over IE.
Oh, I also look forward to XTools or whatever the new ProjectBuilder is. It sounds like it has some sweet time-saving features. And that multi-machine build capability? Yeah!