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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Saturday, October 18, 2003

Panther up close, part two: First impressions

Using Panther (OS X 10.3), I'm confused by all the talk about this being a major release. Panther is a refinement of what's came before and not a revolutionary upgrade at all. Indeed, from a visual standpoint, Panther is only subtly improved over its predecessor with a muted gray replacing the miserable, stark white pinstriping of previous versions. Aside from the brushed metal finder, there is nothing obvious in the UI to even indicate this is a new product, and the fact that nothing screams "new" out at you while you're using it is good news, though contrary to Apple's "150 new features" advertisments. (A funny curiousity: The online help system boasts of just 100 new feature. Hmm...) Indeed, as with Jaguar, I'm a little freaked that there is such a mix of "normal" OS X windows and brushed metal OS X windows: You'd think the anal retentive UI designers at Apple would standardize on a single look, and that the anal retentive OS X users would call them on it when they don't. Curiously, when you hide the toolbar in the Finder, it switches from a brushed metal look to the older look; weird. But the new brushed metal Finder is a welcome, if obvious, improvement. It now includes a set of handy links in a left-mounted pane, ala Windows Explorer. You can quickly jump to local and remote locations like your hard drives, network, and media folders, and eject removable disks. But the Finder is clearly a 1.0 proposition, depsite years of Microsoft inspiration: If you resize this pane, it only resizes for the current window. So you'll have to manually size it as you like in every single Finder window you open. Yikes. I particularly like the new Network location, which lets you browse through your Mac and Windows systems on the home network, without opening a menu and waiting on the resultant dialog box to populate the list of connected systems. Pre-Jaguar, you had to understand an arcane "smb://" syntax to do this quickly; Jaguar added the auto-populating dialog (and was smart enough to hide the file gobblygook Mac systems feel the need to leave in every network location they visit). Now, in Panther, it's even more automated. This is a good example of the way in which Panther is refined and improved, subtly, over previous versions, and made more accessible to less technical users. In other words: This isn't new functionality, it's just an improvement of a feature that's been there since the beginning. This sense of refinement pervades Panther, and when I consider all the things that haven't change, I'm again struck by the fact that this is a minor upgrade that should have cost $20-30 and not $129, especially to anyone that bought a Mac or Jaguar within the past six months. But overall, I'm happy with the refinements and new look and it's clear that OS X is now a mature, usable product, applicable to a wide range of users. There are still problems--the online help still sucks and there's no obvious starting point or interactive help should you need to do something complicated--but it's no worse than Windows 98. That's not too shabby, and it's certainly better than anything the Linux camp has to offer at this point.

[ Posted at 8:12 AM | Permalink ]