Panther stuff
p. My local Apple Centre emailed at the end of the week with an invitation to come to a Panther party on Friday night. They had permission to sell Panther at 8pm—a full 4 (or 5?) hours before it was released in the States. I had previously ordered 3 copies for all our Macs at work, and of course I jumped at the chance to spend the weekend tinkering with it.
p. The Apple Centre here is really tiny. They don’t have a lot of space to keep stock in, so most of their business is ordering in hardware and software, repairs, and a fair bit of Education account business with the University—it’s just a couple of rather small rooms. When I turned up after dark, the place had the feel of a 1930s speakeasy, with a lot of furtive looking geeks hanging around, collars turned up, and then emerging clutching black boxes under their raincoats before they hurried off into the night. “Psst. Wanna buy a pukka operating system?”.
p. It was all great fun. They had some machines set up and running Panther, so the monetary transactions were all carried out to a soundtrack of oohs and ahs, as people discovered Exposé for the first time.
p. It was quite late when I got back so I didn’t install until today. I also wanted to read my iFriend[1] Joe’s new eBook, [“Take Control of Upgrading to Panther”:http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/panther/upgrading.html]. If you haven’t upgraded yet, I heartily recommend the book to ensure that you make the right choices while upgrading, and take all the safety precautions you can. It’s $5 well-spent in my opinion.
p. I’ll probably post some more considered reaction over the next few days, once I have had a chance to explore all the new features. So far, the install seems to have gone without to much incident, though I did have a bit of a nasty moment when “Vim”:http://www.vim.org/index.php failed to launch. To my relief, the problem is just that Perl is in a new location in Panther, but Vim is linked to the old location. The “work-around”:http://groups.yahoo.com/group/vim-mac/message/1060 is just to link the new location to the old:
sudo ln -s /Previous Systems/Previous System 1/System/
Library/Perl/darwin /System/Library/Perl/darwin
p. Other than that, the main huge benefit seems to be increased speed and snappiness all round—it almost feels like I have a new machine!
fn1. Joe coined the phrase, and I rather like it.
1
I am pleased with Panther, so far. I've noticed some probs with Entourage though. It keeps saying "Not Enough Memory" but as I've got an 800 Mzh G4 iMac wih 768 RAM it shouldn't be a prob.
I get frustrated with my Email programme very often because I find both Entourage and Mail rather cumbersome. Eudora is too archaic.
The thing I like best in Panther is definitely Expos� but I am also glad the colour coding from 0S9 is finally back.
The Apple Store in Stockholm was awash with geeks and more iPods than I'd ever seen before. I had to fight hard to resist one...----- I have just installed it on this Mac too, sad little man that I am. I have to say it is worth the money. Apart from Expose, fast user switching is pretty amazing too.
by ThoughtBadger @ 26/10/2003 1:10 am • Permalink •
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