PANTHER

I got around to installing the copy of Mac OSX 10.3 which I bought at our friendly neighborhood Apple Store the other day (could have saved $20 if I bought it off Amazon, but of course I wanted immediate gratification for something it took me nearly two weeks to getting around to installing). Damn this thing is sweet. Let me try and point out some of the pitfalls I’ve had though so my friends can avoid them. But first, let me rave about some of the features.

• SPEED – I usually run my 12″ PowerBook G4 800MHz at reduced processor speed since there are battery and heat issues running it at high speed. However, even when running at full tilt there was a noticeable lag in the interface response under Jaguar. Panther is, visibly, twice as fast in the interface. This is a huge win for me since I spend probably twelve hours a day on my computer and a 10% decrease in speed means a lost hour of my life waiting for my computer. I’d found my self going back to my old Linux/X desktop if I knew all I was doing was email all day (no Office apps needed). I honestly don’t care about quantitative numbers, I don’t do activities which require a lot of CPU. I care about qualitative improvements in my daily work flow. I’m comfortable in saying that Panther running in Reduced CPU mode is faster than Jaguar was running at the Highest setting. (This might also have something to do stripping everything down and starting from scratch, more on that later).
• Fast User Switching – The fact that I can very quickly log in someone else to the machine without having to log out myself is fantastically useful. They even made it possible for people to switch while my screen is locked and I’m away from the computer. This is something that Unix still hasn’t gotten right (and I don’t care if XP has it). This (and the above) feature alone are worth it enough to me for the full purchase price of Panther. It’s so useful I’m even more inclined to buy a cheap iMac or iBook for home use.
• Expose – This isn’t actually a feature that I think is drop-dead cool, but since I gave up on trying to bend the interface to my ingrained numpad window focus I’ve used on X for so long, Expose makes window management without virtual desktops make a lot more sense. For the past eight or nine years I’ve had a highly tuned X Windows configuration which is as close to “Psychic Focus” as you’re gonna get. My numeric keypad mapped to specific regions on the screen, and holding the Control key would let me use the keypad to switch to any of 9 different virtual desktops. By tiling windows in specific places and building a workflow habit over the years, I was able to access any specific window instantly, and it really became second nature. Now, I’m trying to submit to THE WILL OF STEVE, and getting used to Alt-Tab, hiding applications, and Expose, and I’m close to convincing myself that on a laptop with no numpad this actually works a little better.
• In general the UI just seems a lot cleaner. Alt-Tab works a lot better with the giant pop-up menu in the middle of the screen. Animations are much faster. Icons are easier to see, and I actually like the new Finder. Overall, their incremental improvements help both usability and keep the UI fresh and modern.

There is a much more detailed review over at Ars Technica and the latest print issue of MacWorld has a good review with some useful hints as well. But now, on to my own hints.

I specifically wanted to do a complete wipe and install of my old machine because I felt that the default install shipped with a lot of cruft and I know that I had installed quite a bit more as I got used to MacOS again. There are three options for the Panther install: Upgrade (leave everything), Archive and Install (try to keep important stuff, but replace the OS…possibly breaking some other apps), and Install (wipe everything). If you’re not comfortable making a full backup of your machine and understanding that you’re going to lose at least some settings, then I highly recommend you perform one of the first two. For my full re-install I archived off everything in my home directory to a file server at my house, and took an inventory of all the apps (AND THEIR LICENSE KEYS!) I actually used. The main things I missed:

• Non-Apple applications which shipped from the factory are not actually part of the boxed OS. So anything in the “Apple Value Bundle” like OmniGraffle or OmniOutliner (two of the best applications I’ve ever used) won’t get installed with a fresh Panther install. I could probably have copied those off and then re-installed them in the Applications folder, or maybe found them somewhere on the discs which shipped with my laptop, but I was going to buy licensed copies anyways, so this didn’t bother me in the end. Note that this doesn’t apply to the iLife suite, like iPhoto, iTunes, and iMovie. You still get those with the base OS (good call, Apple).
• I lost my iCal data. While copying and restoring ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook seemed to be enough for my contacts, iCal data was no-where to be found in my home directory. This isn’t a huge loss since it’s all stored in my Palm anyways, but it’s a minor pain.
• I lost my NetNewsWire subscriptions. Again, don’t know where they hide (although the history of what I read seemed intact when I went back and manually added all my feeds…oddd). Oh well.
• UPDATE:Also almost lost my Quicken data, as the “file” (which is really a directory) wasn’t recognized as openable after copying it back. Better to export or backup the file and then re-load it from said backup.

So, unless you’re comfortable with a little discomfort (?!?), don’t go this route. But in the end, I’ve freed up a good three gigs of disk space, have a faster machine, and feel that it will be more maintainable for the future.

UPDATE: My-friend-at-Apple, Wiley, taught me that the NetNewsWire subscriptions are stored in the global defaults database, which is accessible through the “defaults” command-line tool. I could have exported the whole set with the command “defaults read com.ranchero.NetNewsWire”, and then re-imported the same data by piping that file into “defaults write com.ranchero.NetNewsWire”. Quite possible to also just copy the file and restore it, as it lives in ~/Library/Preferences/com.ranchero.NetNewsWire.plist. I knew this had to make more sense than the Windows registry!