Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a Faint Praise
After a week or two of using Panther, I’m impressed. But not so much. My late adoption means that there is little point in summarising new features, or pointing out major flaws, so here’s a brief list of little things I’ve noticed:
It’s wonky, in the sense that various settings and preferences just won’t stick. For example, I use different Energy Saver settings depending on whether my iBook is plugged in or running on battery power. No matter what I do, Panther refuses to stick to them, and sometimes makes up a new set of settings, seemingly of its own accord. This means I can find myself with a near-dead battery after a couple of hours, thanks to Panther erroneously thinking I’m plugged in, and using the ‘Highest Performance’ settings instead of the ‘Longest Battery Life’ ones.
Similarly, iTunes has a tendency to reset my iTunes Music Folder to the default, rather than the directory on an external hard drive where I keep my music. Whenever iTunes does this, I have to transfer and re-import any music erroneously imported into the default folder, and then wait an age while iTunes updates the location of seven thousand odd files after I’ve reset the location.
I assume there’s a technical term for this sort of preferences-based wonkiness, but I don’t know it.
Then there’s the worrying Finder glitches, where all of a sudden basic commands like alt + Mac + H refuse to work, and the Menu Bar develops a worrying lag. This seems to follow recent use of Expose, but I can’t quite put my finger on what causes it.
Also, Panther seems a little needy when it comes to authentification - do I really need to confirm my password when ejecting an external drive? I didn’t under Jaguar.
Waking from sleep is another problem. Before, there was the slightest of interruptions while Jaguar stretched its arms and rubbed its eyes, now I have to put up with ten seconds of the TrackPad wigging out, tabbing between applications behaving in a decidedly odd fashion and the CD drive having a fit.
And, come to think of it, what’s happened to my CD drive? Pre-Panther, it burnt discs in a trice, now it’s sluggish to the point of indolence, taking close to ten minutes to burn an audio CD from iTunes, slightly less to burn a full disc of data. If you’re suffering similar problems, DiskBlaze speeds things up considerably in the latter case. But it costs $19.
On the plus side: well, everything is much faster: searching for files is near-instantaeneous, switching between applications engaged in heavy shit is too. Overall, the spinning beachball of death seems to be a thing of the past.
Expose is a boon, especially the magical tiling of the frontmost application’s windows, but strikes me more as a pretty trick than a genuinely useful productivity feature - for the most part, I’m still using a combination of LightSwitch tabbing, LaunchBar launching and Finder hide ‘n’ revealing to manage open windows, mainly because this keeps my fingers in the usual typing position, rather than stretching upward to the function keys. (I’ve tried mapping the Expose functions to various different key combinations, but haven’t yet found a comfy alternative.)
One thing that does get the full McCartney-style thumbs up is Fast User Switching. I quite often need to log in as root, but it’s usually to make very minor changes. With Jaguar, a task that should’ve taken seconds was a ten minute affair involving a full reboot; now it’s a few keystrokes.
So, yeah, Panther is just dreamy, but it’s hard to revel in the feline fun when it throws up so many little obstacles to enjoyment.
How’s it going for everyone else?
I replaced my Music folder with an alias to the one on the external drive when I first set it up; haven’t had any issue with iTunes trying to revert to a local drive. As for your other issues, I can’t say I’ve seen any of them, although Panther certainly has its share of new wee bugs. Did you install over an existing version of Jaguar (I started fresh, just in case)? Maybe try rebuilding permissions?
Posted by brian w at 7pm on 28.11.03
I installed over the top of a previous version of Jaguar, and everything seems to be working as intended. Indeed, the soi-disant beachball of death only appears when using BitTorrent, but that’s such a memory sink that I’m not surprised. Waking from sleep is, indeed, a drag, but I’m willing to let that slide since, like Jack says, everything else is—and in quite a remarkable way, i should add—much faster. Not tried any CD burning yet, but I’ve got some backing up to do over the weekend, so we’ll see. I’m just glad that I got my modem working, unlike some. (Scroll down for the comments.)
Posted by Leon McDermott at 8pm on 28.11.03
Brian - I started fresh too, but then restored all my old prefs via Backup. I suspect that was a terrible mistake.
Len - mad props, word, etc., on use of soi-disant. Considering the context…
Posted by Jack Mottram at 12am on 29.11.03
I’d like to shed light on the fact that you’ve spent £99.01 on an upgrade which basically means you can press F9-F11 and show your friends some pretty OpenGL magic and you got a performance boost, which should have been a free download. It’s called a service pack in the Windows world.
It goes to show that advertising works. A bit of shiny metal and a white background and everybody whips out there Apple ID and places an order.
I’m sorry to belittle Apple, but I manage 25 Macs at work and they are a nightmare. They crash and people can’t work efficiently on them. Microsoft offer substandard software for them. I can understand animosity towards Microsft, but just use use linux if you have that sentiment. This whole lifestyle, iPod, digital media hub (i.e. make media available at a granular level, a track at a time, and eventually extract more money from us) thing is, in my eyes, just hype and showing you shiny ways of doing things you could already do for free anyway.
Linux, Open Source, Free Software, that’s the new cool!
Posted by Donny at 12am on 29.11.03
i resist the panther!
i am strong!
Posted by Donna at 11am on 29.11.03
you got a performance boost, which should have been a free download
Can’t argue with that. Between annual upgrades and the not-quite-pointless .Mac account I’m being stung for lots of money. It’s a con, I’m a mark - but I don’t really mind. It’s laziness, really - I could go linux and save an absolute fortune, but I’d have to learn how to use a computer all over again from scratch.
Clicking shiny buttons is easy and fun!
Posted by Jack Mottram at 2pm on 30.11.03
apart from the world of pain modem hell, i love it. my only bugbears are that some of the keyboard shortcuts in abelton live don’t work now (expose seems to have stolen them!) and weirdly, if i have safari open, peak (an audio editing app which i use about 50 times a day) goes absolutely haywire. threaded mail is the greatest thing ever!
Posted by stirmonster at 9am on 04.12.03
You can change the Expose keys in System Preferences… dunno if that would help though.
Panther problem of the day: my cousin’s Panther woes mentioned elsewhere now include a bug where every time he hits a volume key all his apps force quit and he gets logged out!
Oh, and might’ve said this in another thread, but I managed to ge the Speedtouch working fine with Panther on my iBook first time - maybe it’s a Powerbook-specific problem?
Posted by Jack Mottram at 9am on 04.12.03