*** From the Archives ***
This article is from July 17, 2003, and is no longer current.
Under the Desktop: Finding the Feline, Apple’s Forthcoming Panther OS X
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Attendees at this month’s Macworld CreativePro conference and expo will get the first public look at the forthcoming Power Macintosh G5 workstation. Version 10.3 of Mac OS X, aka Panther, may be given somewhat less exposure to the public, on the other hand. Yet with a powerful imaging technology under the hood, along with a variety of new interface elements, Panther may tip the balance for creative professionals still debating about Generation X.
In my previous column, I discussed the introduction of the new Power Mac G5 line at last month’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. At the same time, Steve Jobs showed the gathered programmers the Panther update. According to Apple, it will include a long list of “more than 100 new features” — from the evolving OS X interface, to a variety of helper applications that can expand the security, compatibility and usability of the Mac. Apple now has an entire section of its Web site devoted to the subject, in what it calls a “Sneak Preview,” although it’s difficult to find a trace of sneakiness, other than it’s still awaiting release.
Some of Panther’s new features are aimed at consumers, others for business users. Apple has pitched some new applications as productivity enhancers, such as iChat AV, Apple’s new voice and video messaging application (see Figure 1). It’s now in public beta release and will be available as a separate product for Jaguar (Mac OS 10.2); it supports ordinary FireWire camcorders as well as Apple’s new $149 iSight Web cam.
Figure 1: Apple’s new high-quality webcam is called the iSight. Here you can see a screen shot of a virtual face-to-face meeting with someone over the Internet. I see the larger image of the person on the other end as well as a thumbnail image from my camera. Of course, the quality of the image depends on the bandwidth available, the performance of the camera and the processing power of the computer. And it’s no video conferencing system; Apple is pitching it for one-to-one chats. Meanwhile, I’m dressing up more at the home office — meaning that my shirt has sleeves!
A Leaner, Faster Cat
I’ve had a brief spate of hands-on experience with Panther, and I was impressed by its increased functionality and performance, even for a beta release.
Many longtime Mac users have commented on Panther’s new primary window interface for files and folders (see Figure 2). The Finder toolbar has moved to the side and is now called the Places sidebar. It presents items usually found on the desktop as well as personalized shortcuts to folders. In addition, the new interface lets users apply colors to files and folders, a popular practice with classic Mac users.
Figure 2: Panther’s file windows now feature a left-hand sidebar that holds many items usually found on the desktop, such as mounted disks, your home directory, and the trash. It makes maneuvering easy, especially for those of us using a trackpad on a notebook. You can also add aliases of folders, another convenience.
This new Finder layout also includes an Action button, which offers the available set of contextual commands. With the two-button mouse a standard feature, Windows users have always had better access to such commands. The Mac OS has offered this functionality through a mouse and Control key combination, and still most users forget that the shortcuts exist. This new button may remind them.
Apple will also take some of the pain out of installing and managing fonts with the Font Book utility (see Figure 3). Fonts and font management can be troublesome in OS X, since fonts can be stored in different spots around the system. Font Book provides some simple management capabilities, allowing users to turn on and off individual fonts as well as groups of fonts. It’s interface offers a file browser view into a font or a character set.
Figure 3: Panther’s Font Book utility program puts most font-related functions in one place, including the Key Caps tool and even the font installer.
For a fuller run down of some of the new features slated for Panther, check out Apple’s afore-mentioned Sneak Preview section.
No Fool’s Gold in Quartz
Panther’s primary benefit to content professionals will come from updates to OS X’s Quartz imaging model. The Panther version will be faster and more robust, and on top of that, Apple will exploit the technology in several interesting and productive ways, including new ways to navigate the desktop, find files, and browse PDF files.
Quartz is the imaging model that’s used for OS X and which is based on PDF. It offers a sophisticated architecture for dealing with images and layers of images, whether inside your traditional graphics application or in an ordinary “productivity” application.
In Jaguar, Apple introduced Quartz Extreme, really just another way of saying support for hardware acceleration. As mentioned in my recent column, the new G5 models will provide a slot for an 8X AGP Pro card, bringing even more speed with hardware acceleration for both 2D and 3D images.
However, I found a speed boost from Panther even on an older Power Mac G4 model without the Quartz Extreme acceleration.
Quartz deals with images and also concerns the handling of text. For example, the Panther version of Apple’s Preview PDF reader is much faster at displaying and searching PDF files. Of course, even the current Jaguar version is annoyingly slow on any machine, so any speed gain would be a relief.
However, this text-handling performance gain is across the board, as other applications can take advantage of the low-level architecture. I copied about 10,500 text files of varying sizes to folder on Panther folder and then searched them for a single term. The results began arriving almost immediately and the search was completed quickly, finding the 125 entries, even though there had been no indexing.
In addition, to speed, the updated Preview application will offer important PDF reading features currently missing from the Jaguar version, such as text selection and copying. It will support the PDF 1.4 format. Apple said Panther’s Preview will also support color-space conversion, image sampling, and compression.
Another example of Quartz in action is Exposé, Panther’s new feature for navigating the desktop (see Figure 4). Often our desktops become crowded with open windows, tool palettes, and images. This is certainly true when running OS X, since the operating system takes advantage of a modern memory architecture and lets users open many more applications and windows than before. At the same time, LCD screen sizes have increased as have resolutions, which have also enabled this trend toward clutter on the desktop.
Figure 4: Expose settings are managed in System Preferences. Each corner of the screen can be set to trigger one of the actions.
Exposé offers three views and behaviors to mitigate the clutter: It can clear the desktop of all windows; tile all the windows of the current applications and let you easily sort through them (useful to finding that buried image when editing multiple photos in Photoshop); and finally, organize all the open windows on the desktop and then permit quick movement between them. It sounds complicated but it’s easily managed with Function keys.
Making the Right Move?
Panther will present a tough question for creative professionals holding fast to the classic Mac OS platform. Is now the time to upgrade to OS X?
No doubt, the application side of the equation has evolved over the past year. Adobe has offered a wide range of OS X-savvy versions for a while, and Quark this summer finally released QuarkXPress 6.0. And the OS itself is vastly improved in Jaguar and the forthcoming Panther.
In addition, some concerns about drivers and slow performance have been eased as well, if not by the speed tweaks of the operating system itself and tuned applications, then by the G5 models due in the next couple of months. These problems were definite barriers to adoption in the past.
The real question will be whether or not your workflow can benefit from the transition. OS X offers vastly superior stability when compared with the older classic system, as well as better compatibility with Windows workflows and a more robust Java engine. Some of these characteristics may be important to your workflow.
If you’ve ignored the transition, now is an excellent time to begin. Experiment with an OS X Jaguar workflow alongside your current Mac OS 9 setup. Take the time to see what you will need in the new workflow, for both software tools and hardware, especially if you’re running older SCSI-based peripherals, such as scanners and printers. You may have to look to third-party vendors for OS-X-savvy drivers for some devices.
There’s no great hurry, however. Move as your time and pocketbook will permit.
Many reports have pegged the new OS’s arrival in the early fall, however, Apple’s official line said the update “will be available by the end of this year.” As the saying goes: “Things can be imagined more quickly than they can be achieved.” So Panther’s release date later in the year might come closer to the mark if schedules slip a bit.
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