Salkever: Panther ‘loaded with small improvements’

Mac OS X 10.3 (“Panther”) “isn’t a huge improvement, but it’s faster and loaded with small enhancements that’ll make your Mac purr,” Alex Salkever writes in the latest Byte of the Apple column for Business Week Online.

“As I used it more, I came to appreciate the small courtesies that make it so much easier to use than Microsoft’s Windows,” he says. “First thing I noticed was the speed. It’s still not blazingly fast, but I spent a lot less time waiting for applications to open up or software to respond.” For instance, he finds that iPhoto and iTunes are noticeable faster.

Salkever also appreciates the changes in the graphical interface, such as the “new and improved Finder box” and Expose. Regarding the latter, he says it “will probably reduce carpal tunnel syndrome among Mac users.” Salkever adds that FileVault and SecureEmpty Trash “appeal to my paranoid side” with their security features.

Panther also has a lot of other “little improvements” that he loves. Among them are the revamped Address Book that standardizes all phone numbers on a single format and the new anti-spam feature in Apple Mail that strips out a piece of code many junk mailings contain to notify the sender that the message arrived and that the address belongs to a live e-mail account.

“To say Panther is perfect would be disingenuous,” Salkever writes. “I’ve already read plenty of complaints. I myself had some strange application crashes immediately after converting. And a friend had to hard-reboot his system after Panther crashed and as a result had to rebuild some data on his desktop. In general, though, it seems Panther is more stable, faster, and more fun than Jaguar.”

For details on the new features of Panther, see our Oct. 24 article.