Panther: Redefining OS X

• Article 1 of 53
• iCreate, October 2003
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Every day, in every way, the Mac is getting better and better. You’d like it to be true, but of course, it isn’t. Because what seemed high tech, modern and state-of-the-art not so long ago (“What? I can copy files and move items to the Trash at the same time? This OS 8 is a miracle!”) becomes tired, insufficient and antiquated almost from the moment it’s released as computers will insist of getting faster and cheaper.

Unlike a television or a toaster, though, computers don’t need to be replaced just because they’re a few years old and don’t have the same go-faster stripes as the newest versions. The software that makes a Mac a Mac instead of a Windows PC – a user-friendly instead of user-frightening interface, a marked tendency not to go wrong every time the family pet walks past, and the ability to do quite clever things without demanding its user spend a day in the local library or write to Jack Schofield at The Guardian to find out how to configure it – isn’t soldered into the computer. It’s changeable, upgradeable and every year, it does get better and better.

Provided you’re willing to fork out a hundred quid or so for a few CD ROMs.

Within the next few months, the latest version of the Mac’s personality, its operating system, is going to become available – Mac OS X 10.3 aka ‘Panther’ - and iCreate has got hold of one of the latest test versions to give it a spin and see what new things will make you damn glad you bought a Mac. However, this software is not yet ready for public consumption, otherwise Apple would have started selling it by now, so some things don’t work the way they should yet. Despite all that, 10.3 is already shaping up as a worthwhile upgrade.

For a long time, in the great Mac vs PC, “my computer’s better than your computer” debate that begun in 1984 when Apple released the first Macintosh, Mac users could justifiably claim their computers were better than PCs. Windows was hard to use and crashed more often than Nigel Mansell. That’s not to say Macs didn’t crash. They did. A lot. Windows simply crashed even more often.

But after Microsoft released Windows 95, it became harder and harder to rub PC users’ faces in the dirt. Windows wasn’t that much harder to use and it didn’t crash that much more often. In fact, sometimes it crashed less. And as Microsoft slowly improved their operating systems with Windows 98 (Windows 95 with a web browser) and Windows ME (Windows 98 with a new name), they were developing a new version of Windows – Windows NT, which became Windows 2000 – that didn’t crash very much at all.

Apple knew that sooner or later Windows would overtake the Mac. The Mac’s operating system would need to be improved. Unfortunately, the first Mac’s memory had been so small, the writers of its operating system had had to compromise a lot when writing it. So when Apple decided to modernise its system software, it discovered that its racing car was really a good-looking chassis built round a Ford Anglia.

In a series of cock-ups and disasters of which the Keystone Cops would have been proud, Apple attempted time and again to develop a modern version of the Mac OS as the company eventually called its operating system. ‘Pink’, ‘Taligent’, ‘Copland’ and ‘Gershwin’ all had their development day and all failed. It wasn’t until the arrival of Gil Amelio as Apple CEO in 1996 that the company decided enough was enough and it was time to get radical.

While starting from scratch was appealing, to develop a completely new operating system takes a lot of time and a lot of money, both of which Microsoft had already invested. To ensure Apple wasn’t left a decade behind Microsoft technologically, Apple needed to get a leg up and begin with something that was at least more than a few ideas on a whiteboard.

Things could have gone really badly wrong at this point. Amelio seriously considered waving a white flag of surrender and licensing Windows NT from Microsoft, bolting the Mac’s interface on top of it. Fortunately, someone withdrew his supply of crazy pills and he thought better of it. Soon, a call by one of Apple’s engineers to an old friend at NeXT resulted in something that caught everyone by surprise: the return of Steve Jobs.

Jobs, one of the two Steves who founded Apple and the driving force behind the Mac, had been ousted from Apple in the late 80s. Convinced he knew best what the computer industry needed, Jobs set up NeXT, a company that sold computers disguised as black cubes and which ran a variety of the Unix operating system called NeXTStep. NeXTStep was buzzword-compliant and had some other excellent technologies, including its development framework OpenStep.

Amelio realised NeXTStep was what Apple needed, and it wasn’t long before he bought NeXT.

Now Apple had a new operating system, it needed to work out a way to get all its customers to use it. The Mac programs everyone had come to love wouldn’t run on NeXTStep. Amelio announced the new operating system, now codenamed Rhapsody, would have a ‘yellow box’ – OpenStep – which would run programs able to use all the modern features of the operating system; it would also have a ‘blue box’ – an environment where customers could run their Mac programs, but without the benefit of the new features.

Jobs was not impressed by Amelio or his plans for Apple. Using a display of his so-called ‘reality distortion field’ that boarded on Jedi mind-powers, he was able to convince the board of directors not only to dispose of Amelio, but also to hand in their resignations.

Within a few months, Jobs consigned Rhapsody to the dustbin and unveiled a new approach. Instead of forcing developers to completely rewrite their programs for the ‘yellow box’ (now called ‘Cocoa’), they could rewrite their applications slightly and they would run on both the new operating system, now called OS X, as well as the Mac OS.

After some so-so releases, OS X finally hit maturity in July 2002 with the release of Jaguar, aka OS X 10.2. Now, just a year later, comes Panther – OS X 10.3.

Like 10.2, Panther will be compatible with anything with a G3 processor or better. Anything bought within the last year will certainly be able to use it and there’s no sign that any older computers are going to be unsupported. But the devil is always in the detail, so don’t be surprised if Apple, in a Renaissance theatre-style aside, hastily whispers that, in fact, some features don’t work so well or at all on older hardware, as happened with 10.2.

As with most of Apple’s OS updates since 7.0 (excluding OS 8.0 and OS X), there are few really big grabs in Panther’s features list that make you say “I really, really must spend nearly £100 to buy that and make my Mac slightly better”. But Panther is probably the first release that fulfils the promise that the Mac faithful have been waiting for for so long – a modern, stable operating system that’s as fast as or faster than the old Mac OS, as easy to use as the Mac OS, with features that will make Windows users’ weep with envy. After working with various betas of 10.3 for the past few weeks, I’d say that the long development cycle to weld all of the Mac OS’s useful features onto NeXTStep and bring in some more mouth-waterers is finally over.

The first thing long-time Mac users will notice about Panther is that the brushed metal appearance of iTunes, iPhoto and other Apple software has now made it to the Finder, which has seen a number of other interface improvements as well. Each Finder window now resembles an iTunes window, with a bar down the side as well as a toolbar at the top. By default, this bar has shortcuts to all the useful places on your hard drive, such as the applications folder and the folders of your home directory, and to disks, servers and your local network. It also has a link to your iDisk, if you have a .Mac account, which has had an upgrade of its own.

The search box in the toolbar looks the same but is far better; typing anything into it will instantly produce a list of files containing those characters, much as iTunes narrows down song lists.

There’s also a new actions button which provides easy access to all the options once hidden in the contextual menu (what do you mean you don’t know how to get contextual menus? You’re not alone. Apparently, most users of the Mac OS, both old and new, didn’t know there were contextual menus, since standard Mac mice only have one button).

There are some big changes to the Finder that fall under the general category of ‘Wow’ and are worth looking at in greater detail (see fast user-switching and Exposé in box ‘Six amazing new features in Panther’). But other smaller elements are different as well and make a bigger impact on everyday use. In one excellent change on Apple’s part, the previously useless Network ‘globe’ that appeared in Finder windows now gives you a view of all the servers on your network. In other words, it now does exactly what it always should have done and what everyone expected it to. Radical or what?

It’s not just the Finder that’s changed. Virtually every program in 10.3 appears to have had a slight makeover with the intent of making it easier to use. The open and save dialogs are almost up to their OS 9 levels of usability thanks to the inclusion of column views as well as list views. There’s a decent network setup assistant, a character palette in every program that gives you access to all the symbols for which you previously had to go to Keycaps, menubar icons for Classic, the ability to compress files into Zip archives directly from the Finder menu, and the accessibility options for the deaf and blind are vastly improved.

Just to prove that every OS X release has to have a few things brought back from the dead (aka Mac OS), desktop printers are back, folder actions are back, and labels have returned to the Finder. Which at least means you can now colour-code all your files. Hooray.

Now, with a little bit of thought, you could see how some of these interface improvements might be worth the upgrade price alone. While many Mac traditionalists and user-interface experts may throw up their hands in horror, I found that after using 10.3 for a while, it was a great shock to go back to 10.2. The speed improvements in the whole system are at least as great as the improvements from 10.1 to 10.2 and it is now as fast as OS 9 at most things, and faster at others. The new Finder windows are definitely an improvement, and having two toolbars means you can have twice as many shortcuts in one window without it stretching from screen edge to screen edge. If I were to add up the amount of time these features might save me, I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be too long before they paid for themselves.

But it’s not many people, myself included, who would buy an operating system on the strength of a time and motion study of interface usability. Fortunately, Apple has also chosen to include a few more headline grabbers. Well-aware that its former claims - that OS X would revolutionise font management and programs such as ATM Deluxe and Suitcase would be things of the past - were pretty much crazy talk, it has developed Font Book, a tool for viewing, enabling, disabling and installing fonts. While an improvement on OS X’s current inept font handling, it still displays the notorious “Not Invented Here Syndrome” that Apple has frequently exhibited. Although the requirements for calendar software (time zones, “Go to Today” buttons, etc), address books (categories for contacts) and font management programs have been well-known for years, Apple insists on developing software such as iCal and Address Book that lack these major necessities. Font Book lacks the versatility of Suitcase and other similar utilities, insisting that fonts have to be stored in folders of its own determination. It lacks the auto-activation features of commercial font management programs. It also completely choked on my (admittedly very large) collection of fonts, although Apple says it will be better come final release time.

The other big addition is FileVault, the kind of thing that will endear Apple to businesses. An improved version of the Apple File Security software bundled with Mac OS, FileVault encrypts data on the fly so that if someone nicks your laptop, they won’t be able to read the data in your home directory, even if they take your hard drive out and use another computer to read it. FileVault’s not as good as a Windows encrypted hard drive, which protects data at the file system level (FileVault is effectively a file system on top of a file system so is slightly slower than an encrypted drive), but it’s still a pretty good step in the right direction.

Panther is undoubtedly a worthwhile investment for just about anyone capable of running it. The speed improvements are impressive and the interface enhancements make OS X feel as friendly and useful as OS 9, while still maintaining OS X’s power and reliability. Oddly, it’s not the major features that make it worth buying, although these are impressive in their own rights. It’s the little improvements throughout the whole system that make it a wise purchase. Even if Apple weren’t certain to make sure all its future iApp updates run only on 10.3, Panther is going to be a must-have investment.

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