pantherized.
¶ by Rob Friesel
Updated to Panther this past week and after a few days of use, ready for to hash it out… First the goods: Despite warnings to the contrary, I’ve not experienced any data corruption as a result of FileVault yet. And maybe it’s just placebo but I feel a lot better now that my personal files are nested in the directory w/ the combination lock on it. On that note, secure trash is nice as well. The OS’ overall performance seems a bit faster, too. Overall responsiveness of folders opening and files moving. Differences may only be noticeable because it’s a G3 iBook, but hey… The new cmd-tab visualization is nice … I know it always just magnified what was in the dock before but it’s much better to not have to shift my vision all the way down. The enhancements to Finder’s toolbar are pretty awesome too — and I must say I’m going to get some serious mileage out of that feature. Expose is actually coming in handy as well — though I must admit I haven’t been able to take as full advantage of it as I would like … maybe if I can get them to hook me up w/ a Mac as my full-time computer at work, then it’d REALLY get a work-out… But the enhancements that have come in the most handy so far have definitely been the improvements to networking. Panther sees my home network w/ complete ease … I don’t need to memorize a single LAN address or the semi-obscure name I might have given to any of the shared folders. And halle-fucking-luja! is the printing application massively improved vis-a-vis shared Windows printers. My ages-old Canon is now totally visible on the network and added in a flash. No problems so far. Oh — and it’s nice having labels back…
Bad/mediocre/weird things… First of all, all the warnings I got didn’t seem to apply. I backed up my data (well, I back-up anyway) but it didn’t seem necessary. Of course, the one thing I didn’t back up was my host files and Apache’s httpd.conf… So my local server environment still isn’t what it was. I got PHP and Perl back up and running but my “[named].localhost” sites are still mis-behaving. (And given my root-relative conventions for file references, you can imagine how this funks a lot of things up…) Java req’d an almost immediate update, for sure. The X.3 JVM is buggy, no doubt. Most of the errs were fixed w/ the 1st patch but I still get the occassional wonky misbehaviour fr/ s/ of my Java-based applications. (mostly jEdit…) My Applescripts menu was gone … I’m sure I can just put it back, but I’m lazy… And it shouldn’t have eaten that in the first place… Fast User Switching is cool but I could do w/o having it put my name up in the Finder bar. (Just seems excessive…) Those seem to be my only real beefs though… Once I get my hosts working again, I’ll be happy as Happy the Clam… (…and if you got that one, you need more help than I…)
More later kids…
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