Panther Roars
Like a good little Macster, I recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.3 (aka Panther). It went off without a hitch despite the fact that depending who you ask I might have taken a slight chance performing a run-of-the-mill upgrade in place of a clean install (recommended by the higher geeks). Me, I’m much too impatient to load libraries into my system twice, so a dirty install it had to be. Yeah, that’s me—livin’ on the edge.
At first, the only thing that seemed to break was my web page. For some reason, Safari was giving a huge top margin to my content, which made it look entirely weird. That problem was quickly blitzed, though, after I narrowed down the culprit to the iTunes Link Maker object tag I’ve recently added. Apparently, setting the style height to 0 pixels does the trick. Maybe I oughtta report that one since none of the other browsers seemed to have a problem.
Other then that, though, Panther has been (excuse my silliness here) quite the cat’s meow. Exposé really is the coolest thing since sliced bread and everything from the Finder to the dropdowns to the save dialogues looks cleaner, appears better organized, and behaves overall much more speedily. One thing I didn’t expect, though, happened after I opened a simple Word document. Having noticed that my Microsoft Word icon changed from its usual blue look to a foreign yellow notebook icon, I thought perhaps the document would double-click into TextEdit (since the rumors of its new compatabilty turned out to be true). It opened X11 instead, which opened OpenOffice, which did that task, well… really, really fast. I mean, after I saw how quickly it came up, I almost entertained the thought of using OpenOffice in place of Word for Mac. That probably won’t happen, but it does show that Apple is making tremendous strides throughout the entire system.
Speaking from a couple days experience, Panther already seems like a great piece of software, grossly more intutive, more thoughtful and cleaner than XP. As Mac OS X evolves, using it and actually being productive with it becomes more of a pleasure each time.
