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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

Monday, January 12, 2004

Tog on Panther

Ask Tog: Bruce Tognazzini takes a long, hard look at Mac OS X "Panther" and, as expected, has some interesting comments. Under "the good," Tog says that Panther is the first OS X version to offer speed comparible to OS 9.x versions, which is largely true (though it's unclear whether most of that is hardware improvements over the past three years). He also likes Expose (a power-user feature) and File Vault (home directory encryption). Under "the bad," Tog lists the Dock (which he discussed accurately long ago); the size of onscreen objects, which is interesting; the weird OS X dialog-drawers; and a bunch of other features (Software Update: "Windows handles this much better, offering small, if excessively frequent, patches that load and install themselves in the background. Mac needs to emulate this approach if they want to become competitive."). Under "the ugly," Tog doesn't have much to say, which is curious, as he's an interface guru and Panther is barely different than the Mac versions he worked on over a decade ago. "It may seem I'm damning Apple with faint praise, considering how much bad I have mentioned. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Apple is indeed back. OS X is a fully-usable powerhouse once more, with a free and open future. I'm giving Apple some free advice, from someone whose advice is normally screamingly expensive, on where to go from here. The way is open." Anyway, it's worth reading, as Tog is the man.

[ Posted at 5:35 PM | Permalink ]