Panther Preview
I just got my hands on a preview release of Panther – Apple’s newest version of OSX. WOW!
The installation was flawless to my external firewire drive and even though the OS booted from my firewire drive, this release of the OS is considerably faster than it’s predecessor Jaguar. The new Finder application is fantastic and it’s “user-centric” paradigm works very well. Another new feature is Fast User Switching. I you have multiple people using the same computer, this feature will be great. It works just as advertised – quickly!
The best feature though, is Expose. I you have a workflow like me, you often have many applications and windows open at the same time, and moving from one window to the other, means dragging windows around or hiding your applications. Expose allows you to press a hotkey, then all windows are shrunk and moved around the screen so that you can see each open window. Your mouse pointer then changes to a hand and you choose the window that you want to switch to, then that window becomes your active window. After a day of using this feature, its going to be hard to go back to Jaguar.
Two thumbs up to Panther – can’t wait until Apple releases this cat!
