- 2006.04.11
This week a friend of mine upgraded to Tiger
(Mac OS X 10.4) on his machine, and he offered me his copy of Panther (OS X 10.3), since
he had no need for it anymore.
I accepted it with great gratitude, because I'd been waiting for a
chance to play around with Panther on my own machine
I've wanted to upgrade to Panther for quite a while, but I never
made the leap (the main reason was that until a few weeks ago I was
still using my Beige
G3, and I really didn't want to push it further past the red line
than it already was).
But now I have a Power
Mac G/450 (see What to Buy When the Old Beige
G3 Is Just Too Sluggish for that story) and sufficient power to try
Panther. So when I got it, I popped the Panther install CD in the drive
and started the installation process. It took about 45 minutes, which
was longer than I was expecting, because I wasn't installing the whole
OS, just upgrading it.
Anyway, I got it installed and started playing around with it.
Here are the features that really caught my eye:
Exposè
Exposè is a very neat tool that allows you to see all of the
windows you have open on the screen at once. This tool is very handy
when I have multiple windows open in multiple applications
simultaneously.
The ability to see every window from every open program is a big
advantage for me, because I normally have several programs and dozens
of windows open at the same time.
Fast User Switching
Fast User Switching is a very neat tool that allows multiple people
to be logged in simultaneously. This is also a very nice tool, because
if someone needs to use my machine, they can login without disturbing
any of my work.
Vicki (the new MacinTalk voice).
Vicki is a remarkably smooth, natural sounding voice (OK, it's no
HAL 9000, but it's light years ahead of Victoria).
DVD Player 4
DVD Player 4 has a better controller with more options, like on
screen information in full screen mode, something that the version that
came with Jaguar (OS X 10.2) never
had.
Google Earth
Those are the things built into Panther that I really like, but the
coolest program you can use doesn't come with Panther: Google Earth.
Google Earth is a phenomenal program that uses satellite photos to
take you anywhere in the world in seconds.
Not only that, but Google Earth seems to know where every street,
grocery store, gas station, restaurant, landmark, hotel, and ATM
machine in the world is. And that's not all - you can even tilt the
photos up to 90° to see 3D terrain!
This has to be about the most amazing program I have ever used, and
I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in the
earth.
One Drawback
The only real problem I have encountered with Panther is that my
graphics card (a 16 MB AGP ATI Rage 128 Pro) has been slowed down
significantly. To give you an idea of what I mean, the iTunes
visualizer was getting about 30 FPS in Jaguar, and that's down to about
16 FPS in Panther. Yes, it's the same version of iTunes.
I guess the only cure for that is a $20 32 MB ATI Radeon Mac Edition
card; I've read it's about twice as fast as the Rage 128.
Other than the problem with my graphics card, the decision to
upgrade to Panther seems to have been a good one.
- Jaguar List, Low End Mac's
email list for OS X 10.2.x users.
- Panther List, Low End Mac's
email list for OS X 10.3.x users.
- Tiger List, Low End Mac's
email list for OS X 10.4.x users.
