i’ve spent most of the weekend getting my recently purchased and configured powerbook reconfigured to use panther. i did a complete backup of my home directory and then performed a clean installation of the os. I read a few posting from various forums about people that had trouble doing an upgrade so i figured i’d rather do one install instead of two in the event that it failed the upgrade.


my first impression thus far has been in a word, comfortable. i’ve always thought that osx was a intuiative operating system but it has always been missing a flow. they never seemed to get things working as smoothly as you would expect, yet it was still better than windows. well with panther it’s all changed. the new exposé and fast user switching are really pushing the apple operating system into new areas where others can do nothing but copy. you can’t really imagine how useful or smooth exposé is until the first time you use it. to instantly see every window you have open on the computer or within an application makes navigation a lot easier. i always have tons of applications open and it takes forever to find my way around sometimes. this makes a time consuming task a simple task for anyone to do.


i was also pleased to see apple steal a feature from windows, the alt tab view that shows your currently open applications. they of course added a bunch of features that windows doesn’t have and likely will end up copying from the mac. you can use your mouse to navigate through the view and you can hit “h” to hide the application or “q” to quit that application.


an another great application enhancement is their threaded discussions in their mail application. i know, something simple that every other application has had forever right? yes, and no … they added a nice threading view but took it one step further and allowed you to thread between mailboxes and folders. imagine having your inbox with a bunch of messages and no context to what you said in the thread. that’s easily solved by command clicking the sent mail folder and you instantly have all of the messages from that mailbox threaded with the other messages so you can see flow. pretty cool ahe?


in short i love the changes they made, i love the new brushed metal interface on more applications, the subtle color changes, and improved usability, and more. i could go on for hours but you get the point. if you own a macintosh i highly recommend you upgrade to panther.