Tribolum.com Making Light of Things

I’ve moved on to the next evolution of the Mac OSX cats. Panther (Mac OSX 10.3) comes after Jaguar (10.2) and Cheetah (10.1). I don’t know what they’re going to name future upgrades. In my opinion they should have started with something small, like Lynx or Ocelot, which I think are still really cool names.

Panther boasts 150 new features, but it would be wise to remember that it is hardly a version 11. It is very much like the Jaguar of old with some improvements. Exposé which every reviewer seems so dazzled with, does the same thing the “Show Desktop” icon in Windows XP does, only loaded with the Apple eye-candy we have all come to expect. It is hardly ground-breaking in nature.

While it is nice to see that Apple isn’t too proud to pick up pointers from the common WinXP, Panther still hasn’t quite figured out the Alt-Tab function. In WinXP, Alt-Tab allows you to move from window to window, regardless of application. Command-Tab in Panther brings up the cool taskbar thingie in the middle of the screen that allows you to select the application (not the window or document) you need to get to. This means that if I have five Word documents open, I’d still need to go through Exposé, or window / document1 on Word’s menu.

Safari has stopped working. It doesn’t crash in the way Windows applications crash. Crash would be too inelegant a word for Apple applications. It “quits unexpectedly”, and the OS is quick to point out that it’s uninformed resignation did not affect the morale of the other applications still hard at work.

I’m running on Camino now, and though my Apple-developed analistic sense of design doesn’t sit well with the fact that Camino’s white iBookish interface doesn’t match the brushed-metal look of Panther or my sweet Powerbook, I’m generally happy with the way it’s performing.