Panther and all of this...

[jakeOSX]

well?

[OPENSTEP]

Dude, it is so cool to be no longer under NDA for Panther

From a programmer's perspective, it's awesome. Under the hood this OS is truly sick. A real good bit of the core is vastly improved, particularly Unicode font layout speed and locking mechanisms. Some of the functionality that they've added in is really mindblowing, especially for foreign language markets...and it is really nice to have X11 shipped on the CDs. That said, some of the under the hood changes are a bit frustrating too and can break software...near all of the non-command line software I develop had something broken in one way or another, usually due to the hcanges in the control layouts.

Parts of it will definitely be a love it or hate it relationship for users. I suspect many people will hate the new Finder. It can get a bit hairy at times. I'm a column view guy, so it kind of makes sense, but it's still a little funky to get used to.

Expose will be a love it feature for anyone. It's functional even on old 16 MB graphics chip video cards..of course the animation isn't smooth, but the utility of it is just insane for people like me who really want 3 monitors but only have one LCD.

The overall speed improvements really are phenomenal. They range from the subtle technical things to the speed of bootup (now can be under 3 seconds on one of my boxes..and I don't have a G5!) and other subtle changes that most people may not pick up (e.g. menu and sheet animations are faster). The speed that it gets on older hardware really is phenomenal...my TiBook 400 actually became useful!

I can say this, though...some of the progrmaming changes within Panther do address significant deficiencies in earlier versions of the operating system, particularly with some of the CoreGraphics areas we're using for NeoOffice. Their OS upgrades don't only respond to user needs or research

ed