Collection of *confirmed* Panther info. - Page 5

What began with iSync Beta and .mac with Jaguar...

... will be taken to new levels with Panther (and the aforementioned new Location Manager). iSync in Panther will take care that your digital life will stay in synch. Contacts, schedules - that's been there before. Safari bookmarks, your home folder (with .mac and Mac OS X Server 10.3) plus anything you really want will be synched with iSync in Panther. Plus: You can set up rules for synching based on 'locations' that you set up with Location Manager. One of our sources says, jokingly (but maybe with some grain of truth in it), that this combined with the Location Manager might take most of the time of Panther's developers, as it has to 'work as advertised'. And losing stuff through synching is something you'll never want to see (again).

.mac will see some serious upgrades according to another source. Apple has seen a steep decline in .mac sales soon after the initial rebate session, that allowed you to subscribe for 49 USD. The source says we'll see some surprises. However, Apple has not yet finalised what will be part of .mac at Panther's release in late Summer. While some features need to be tightly integrated with the operating system, others (most) are internet based and don't need to be released when Panther is. More about this as the information flows in.

Originally posted by kim kap sol
I hate the current Finder...it's in need of a complete overhaul. It needs speed optimizations, it needs new features, it needs lots of things. I think it would be better for Apple to rewrite the whole thing...wipe the slate clean.

And if they're going to rewrite, they might as well rewrite in Cocoa like they've been doing.

At least we'll get a consistent toolbar, some drawers (if the need arises), anti-aliased text for text clippings...

Maybe I don't know what I'm talking about but...I'm the customer here and if the Finder doesn't improve in 10.3, I may start looking else where.

Originally posted by kim kap sol
Yes I did...many, many times. Funnily, people skip over it over and over again.

Faster dev times.

It was a deliberate decision to not use NSToolbar in Safari.

Apple has been moving lots of their apps to Cocoa. Why? You'll know soon enough.

My point is that the Finder needs to be rewritten because it's crippled beyond repair. And if it's going to be rewritten, it should be rewritten in Cocoa because they'll get the Finder working in less time. If Apple really wants to WOW me, they'll have to re-engineer a whole shitload of stuff in the Finder. Right now it looks like 1984 with 128x128 pixel icons, color, and a few gizmos here and there.

(I can't help but notice that the Windows XP Explorer doesn't do such a great job handling large numbers of files either.)

Originally posted by nagha
It was slow, didn't have a good Find command and had UI inconsistencies (transition from 7.x UI to Platinum).

It wasn't until the release of 8.5 that the Finder really became the Golden Finder that everyone speaks of so highly. If you'll take a moment, the Finder would often hiccup and reload itself. Finder copy was awful and wasn't multi-threaded.

Finally, please recall that the Find command had sucked FOREVER until Jaguar was released. This had been a complaint about the Finder ("that can't find anything") for as long as I haved used Macs (beginning with System 6.0.7)

Originally posted by Barto
The toolbar.

Descriptive cursors.

Better sounds.

Recent Folders.

Yes, make the list, and then we can discuss it.

Thursday, May 29

Expect to see the use of impressive, high-resolution 3D interface elements in Panther, from what we've seen recently. It may not be extremely pervasive so that Panther will still run with acceptable performance on every officially supported G3 and G4 system even as it expands to the new PowerPC 970-driven Macs....but it will be a very clear look-and-feel advance from any previous operating system Apple has ever delivered.

Even now, any system that supports 10.2's basic implementation of Quartz Extreme can pull off Aqua's animations and transparency surprisingly well. Panther will flesh out Quartz Extreme significantly, and make much better use of it. Don't be surprised to see more and more of Mac OS X -- the Dock, Finder, System Preferences, Startup Display, et cetera -- employing icons and interface elements that rotate, ripple, expand, contract, and react to user activity or input in a number of ways.

We've only seen a demonstration of this functionality, and our recent look at developmental builds of Panther only included a few examples of it -- despite the numerous others we saw in a demonstration that included use of a new version of Interface Builder that may be distributed at WWDC in June so that third-party developers can update their applications. In fact, it's looking more and more like developers will probably come away from the Worldwide Developer's Conference with a complete Developer Release and Toolkit for building and testing their applications on Panther.

Of course the Developer Release will be incomplete, still a good two months short of its likeliest date of completion to become the retail release of Panther, but it may prove very interesting indeed. Apple fully intends to make its biggest grab yet for the computing world's attention with its feature set. Now that Microsoft is following very closely in Mac OS X's footsteps with its Longhorn operating system project, Apple is looking to quite specifically trump Longhorn across the board -- starting with its very smooth, seamless, and rapidly beneficial move to IBM's 64-bit POWER family of processors.

If you think the POWER4-based PowerPC 970 is impressive, just wait for its cousin from the POWER5 family -- the IBM PowerPC 980. It will reach 4.5GHz-5.0GHz+, support system busses even more incredible than the 970's 6.4GB/s FSB, include a much more powerful Altivec unit, a high-performance on-board memory controller, and countless other improvements that will mean performance levels well in excess of ten times today's. The best part is, the 980 is currently scheduled for only a little over a year from now. Of course that could very well slip...but so far, IBM has executed its timetables for the 970 extremely well -- no more opposite a story could be imagined from what we have seen out of Motorola for the past five years. Expect IBM to deliver very well on its promises to Apple to lift the company out of its hardware performance quagmire in the next two years. There can be no question, based on the very happy mood we've seen in Cupertino recently....the performance equation is going to be tipping quite rapidly and quite clearly in Apple's direction post-haste.

Speaking of Motorola, reliable sources there have said that Apple is now expecting to deliver at least two different Macs that use 200MHz DDR memory and 200MHz SDR frontside busses in the near future with the company's G4 processors. This may mean that Motorola is still having trouble with its PowerPC 7470 chips which support a DDR Frontside Bus (FSB) that could take full advantage of the DDR SDRAM memory Apple has been putting in its systems to little performance benefit (thanks to the PPC 7455's Single Data Rate FSB, which Apple runs at either 133 or 167MHz currently) for over a year now -- and are planning to ship 7455-based systems on slightly faster FSB's for the iMac or perhaps the Powerbook.