Today Apple released the new version of their operating system, Mac OS X 10.3, more commonly known as Panther.
Actually, they released it yesterday at 8pm, and when I woke up this morning a friend of mine was still online in Seattle (1am their time) after the big gathering of ‘hundreds’ for the launch at the local Apple store.
Here, in contrast, our local Apple dealer closed at 5.30pm yesterday, so we had to wait until this morning to get a copy. And they only had 25. It would have been much too nerdy to be seen actually waiting at the door when they opened, so I sauntered in at a much more laid-back five minutes past the hour, and one of those 25 copies is now mine.
I also treated my elderly PowerBook to a new hard disk (so I could do drastic things without destroying my chance of returning to safety) and so I have a completely fresh install of Panther. I copied my applications, documents, some preferences etc into it from a backup on an external firewire drive, and so far it’s all going very nicely.
Like 10.2, this is not a very major overhaul from the appearances point of view, but there are small improvements to almost everything which make the cost (100 UKP) definitely worthwhile for me. The big changes are well documented elsewhere; the main benefit I’ve seen so far is the much better integration with a Windows network, and with remote servers. I can browse the ‘network neighbourhood’, can print to the Deskjet connected to Rose’s Windows machine, and can interact much more seamlessly with remote WebDAV and FTP servers.
And the ‘Exposé‘ feature is lovely too.
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