Earlier today I brought this up Computer Solutions forum over on JLC but since I think BreakTime is a more Mac friondly environmant or at least I think there are more Mac users hanging out here I thought I bringit up here too.
After a streak of 411 days of continuous operation on Mac OSX 10.2 Jaguar without a crash, virus, and only one forced restart (which I may or may not have had to do it turns out) and no problems I could think of (talk about rock solid) that streak ended.
Last Friday night I went to the local Apple store, waited on line for forty minutes like I was getting Springsteen tickets and picked up a copy of OSX 10.3 Panther that I had been sort of anxiously waiting for since I first saw it last summer at the MacWorld Expo show in NYC. Made the switch without any trouble or hint of inconvenience other than it took a few hours for the installer to do it’s job and then began to use the new OS last Saturday morning.
Yeah, I think it’s pretty good and while I have heard a few people complain that $129 is a steep price to upgrade a system that they may have only just recently upgraded to Jaguar, I think just the benefits of the new system feature of Exposé alone is worth the price of upgrading.
I think Exposé is simply the best innovation to window management since the concept of working with overlapping windows and files was created. What happens is you press the F9 key (or any other key you assign the function to) and then all the open windows and files shrink themselves up and distribute themselves on the screen. You can then move you mouse over a particular shrunken window and a little “chicklet” appears with the name of that file or finder window. Click on that shrunken window and the normal sizing returns and that window you clicked on moves to the front. For someone like me who works with lots of different files running in different open applications this is a HUGE deal. And that’s the short version of file and windows management is better than ever.
The Finder has been improved too. Every Finder window now shows you all the available disks, your iDisk and favorite folders in a column on the left side of every open window (and the feature can be turned on an off). And this same feature appears in the save as dialog windows too making keeping all your files in the right place even easier and more convenient. And colors for Finder labels are back with this upgrade too.
Each day this past week I discover a few more new system features that as soon as I can break my old habits are really going to make this even a bigger pleasure and more convenient system to use too. I just discovered the built in Faxing by accident last night when I was saving a documet as a PDF (which is built-in too).
My one complaint and it’s relatively minor one I think is when using the new Fast User Switching feature, while I get the fast user switching functionality I don’t get the really cool 3D animated transition which as I understand it right now is due to not having a OSX10.3 driver for my video card yet. Also when I switch users my Wacom Graphire3 tablet and cordless mouse wont work since it’s an “application” and therefore recognizes and thinks that it is already “in use” by another user.
I could go on and on liek a kind in a candy store but I don’t wat to be too much of a screaming loud noisy Mac evangelist in what is obviously a Windows world but is there anyone else out there who’s made the move or contemplated upgrading?
Replies
Hi,
I have it and it is AWESOME! We never had anything go wrong with Jaguar either, but this is fantastic. My DH and I both use the mac so it is amazingly easy to switch between my side and his, plus the 3D animation is sso much fun.
I don't understand why there are people who are so resistant to Apple. I just love this company. I am convinced that if people were given the chance to use a Mac for a month, they would all be converts. Of course, I don't want to sound preachy either, so that's enough from me. :)
Yup I love it so far but unlike you folks I don't get that 3D animation at all because of the driver update I need and while it doesn't make or break the system for me it is a really neat kool effect. I saw it this past summer at the expo so it really stuck in my mind and when it didn't happen on my machine I was sort of bummed. I'm going to go add a new G5 here soon enough so it will work there but I'd still like to get it to work on the other G3 and G4s.
View Image
ParadigmProjects.com | Paradigm-360.com | Mac4Construction.com
Jeeze, about a month ago I switched my BellSouth DSL server to Earthlink, cause they supported 10.2. Now, you have to understand, I can make any Mac OS crash. It's just a talent I have, and the mac folks and I have a little arrangement<G>
I now love Jaguar, Crashed it once, forced quit 3 times, and now there's another beast! Jaguar is only 49 bucks, should I wait 'til Jobs announces Lion?
EliphIno!
Yeah BB I seem to remember us having this conversation about Jaguar and your internet connection once before. You really do have a talent there though. You could probably get a job with Apple testing their equipment and software. I used to be the same way with skis. We used to say in our family there wasn't a ski made I couldn't break or bend.
Wait till Lion? That may be a while. I had heard that Apple had trademarked the words Lynx, Cougar, Leopard, and Tiger for operating systems but never heard the name Lion mentioned. Maybe someone else already had it trademarked for some other piece of software. Anyway at $49 bucks I think that a yes.
Thinking about those Force Quits you mentioned I wondering how much RAM are you running with? The one thing about Jaguar and Panther is they use up lots of RAM and that's especially so when they are also running Classic at the same time. That can slow things down if the hard RAM is used up and your out there running on just virtual memory which is dependent of free disk space. Some people will restart or force quit when the system bogs down under those conditions not knowing that the machine will eventually will come around and that the whole problem can be easily solved and avoided in the first place by adding more RAM which is relatively cheap nowadays.
Hey by any chance do you recall my mentioning the estimating system I was working on back then too. I'll email you through this Prospero system and send you a link where you can download a version of it to look at. I'd be very interested in getting your comments on it especially if you can find a way to break it. Seriously. The key thing I was looking for with my beta testers was the problems they found and the things the found difficult or inconvenient. I got it in both FileMaker driven and runtime versions so even if you don't have FileMaker it will still run on it own internal engine.
View Image
ParadigmProjects.com | Paradigm-360.com | Mac4Construction.com
Got it and love it EXCEPT...
beware if you are running a FW800 drive. It will crash the drive and you risk data lose. Firmware updates are on the way for the Oxford bridge. I lost 40 GIGs of video footage, but fortunately I backed up first.
I never broke any skis, but I've dislocated some bindings (back in the lace up and strap on days) and wiped out more than a few lift lines (makes it much easier to get a chair<G>).
I'm working with 768 Mgs of RAM. My problem is I just can't stand to leave well enough alone. I'm a trim guy and I have to tweak! Most of my programs are so old I can't get them to work in Classic...the ones I have been able to upgrade to Jaguar work impressively though.
Being a total computer moron, I have no idea what file maker pro is or how it would work, but I'll download your full program and check it out...meanwhile, I'll bide my time 'til Lynx comes out, then Panther will be 49 willies LOL
EliphIno!
Edited 11/2/2003 7:20:11 PM ET by bucksnort billy
Hey BB if you already downloaded that program (before 11:10 pm Sunday night) you'll need to download it again. A bunch of folks spotted a bug in it where you couldn't create a new client to go with a new estimate. That has now been fixed. Here's the URL again.
View Image
ParadigmProjects.com | Paradigm-360.com | Mac4Construction.com
"then all the open windows and files shrink themselves up and distribute themselves on the screen. You can then move you mouse over a particular shrunken window and a little "chicklet" appears with the name of that file or finder window. Click on that shrunken window and the normal sizing returns and that window you clicked on moves to the front."
For eight years (Win 95 and Win 98)I've been able to right click on the task bar and then click Minimize All Windows. They all minimize and retain their button on the task bar and a chicklet appears with the name of the window when you move the mouse over it.
Your description of the Finder window and other dialog windows sounds a lot like what I've been doing for eight years, also.
Not that I'm arguing superiority....just thought it funny.
Rich Beckman
Another day, another tool.
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/
Don't know if it's the same or not (not as my recollection of 95), but here's Apple's description of it.
Jerrald, I'm waiting till I know all my apps are stable with it. I know that VectorWorks currently has a beta version you need for it, and I can't risk mission critical stuff on a beta.
Ahh, it tiles the windows!! That's pretty cool. No, my Win98 doesn't do that.
Rich Beckman
Another day, another tool.
Cloud I knew of a problem VectorWorks 9 had with OSX 10.2 but I skipped over VW9 and went from 8.5 to 10 and we now have 8.5 and 10 in use around here. I haven't put VW10 through all it paces yet on Panther but I will get to that soon enough and I'll give you a report on my experience and keep an eye out for other VW new regarding Panther.
View Image
ParadigmProjects.com | Paradigm-360.com | Mac4Construction.com
They've issued a beta 10.5.1 or something like that to specifically address OSX 10.3.
Rich Exposé is not quite the same as what you talking about with Windows. I can't speak for the later versions of Windows since I don't use them that often but I do a lot of testing of stuff I work on with Windows 95 to test it for backwards compatibility since I find a lot of contractors still use 95 and I feel that's as far back in time as anyone should really go with operating systems. I don't right click in the task bar but instead use Shift F4 to Tile the windows and Shift F5 to cascade them. And correct me if I'm wrong about this too since I just don't work that often in Windows but on my 95 set up the cascading and/or tiling only works within that current application and not all the windows in all the open applications. Plus in 95 the other windows that I didn't click into to use right then remain in their minimized top left corner showing appearance instead of going back to the window size that I had them opened in originally.
While both tiling and cascading are great features I think there is a subtle but significant difference between tiling windows and displaying shrunken windows. That is the difference I am talking about.
When windows get tile the window you see is reduce by dragging the bottom right corner up towards the left so all you end up seeing is the top left comer of the document. When it's an architectural drawing that might be nothing but part of part of a title block or a lot of times nothing at all. In the case of a photograph JPG it might be just a small part of the sky and not show you anything of the whole house house. A photo of the front of the house would look the same as a photo of the back because all you would see is maybe a piece of the sky whereas when a photo is shrunken you still see the whole photo but just in a much smaller version which makes it easier to identify. Does that make sense? With an architectural drawing you can still easily recognize the difference between a plan view and a elevation when you are looking at a shrunken down version of the document view you were just working on.
That's why I said "best innovation to window management since the concept of working with overlapping windows and files was created" to which I referring to cascading display of windows. I think the shrunken windows of Exposé are the next step in this developmental evolution. I do realize if someone is working with tons of open MS Word documents that the visual recognition clues I'm talking about are not an advantage but if you work with a lot of photos, graphics, web pages, or CAD drawings those kinds of clues are a huge plus.
View Image
ParadigmProjects.com | Paradigm-360.com | Mac4Construction.com
"For eight years (Win 95 and Win 98)I've been able to right click on the task bar and then click Minimize All Windows. They all minimize and retain their button on the task bar and a chicklet appears with the name of the window when you move the mouse over it.
Your description of the Finder window and other dialog windows sounds a lot like what I've been doing for eight years, also."
Hate to burst your bubble, but this is totally different.
"Hate to burst your bubble, but this is totally different."
Did you read the whole post?????????????
"Not that I'm arguing superiority....just thought it funny."
There's no bubble!!!!!!! I'm not trying to make a case for windows!!!! I thought it was FUNNY!!!
I'm sorry I guess I have no sense of humor!! (or someone doesn't!)
Touchy, touchy.
Rich Beckman
Time to dump the federal Dept. of Education
Cool beans, thanks for the report. We'll probably wait a few months to upgrade - gotta bump RAM on our iMac FP to 768 (from the original 256) first, as wifey is starting to use Photoshop in earnest.
What hardware do you have this running on?
G5 - luuusssst!
did
Blah, yada, whatever, Hi how are you today
diddidit I only picked up one license because I'm looking to move up to G5s here real soon and Panther will come installed on them. Right now Panther is running for me on a 400 MHz G4 with 448 MB of RAM.
View Image
ParadigmProjects.com | Paradigm-360.com | Mac4Construction.com
Jerrald,
I'm still running 10.1.5 on an old fruit imac 333 with 384 megs of RAM. I'm dying to upgrade to 10.3, but am waiting to see what the "Low end mac" reports about it's performance on older machines is. There has been one cursory set of tests on LEM website, but want to see more data before I overload this old girl. It can never have any more than 384 megs of ram or 6 megs of VRAM.
Lusting over a G5 too. My "new" mac is the 5-year-old iMac. My old mac is my ancient 9500 with a G3 400 upgrade running system 8.5. I use it to run Vectorworks. Vectorworks and the G5 are supposted to be many many times faster than the fastest G4. See http://architosh.com for a detailed report on that.
I've been very stable on my iMac until recently. I installed a new HP printer, and now I get kernal panics at startup every so often. Seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when or why. The panic always hits at "initializing network" stage of startup. Sometimes it takes two restarts to get past it, but never more than two. fsck and norton both fail to fix it. I think that means I need a new G5 ;-)
Steve
I never went through the 10.1 stage. I heard the kernal panic stories and there weren't enough of the programs that were critcal to me that were ready for 10. When Macomedia finally went 10 with Dreamweaver and Fireworks was right before Jaguar so that's when I made the upgrade, So Steven are you a contractor or designer, or contractor/designer?
View Image
ParadigmProjects.com | Paradigm-360.com | Mac4Construction.com
Hi Jerrald,
I'm a small-volume sole proprietor in upstate new york who specializes in restoration work.
In my previous life I was a photojournalist and magazine art director, so Macs are in my blood.
I do a fair amount of design work in Vectorworks to help my clients visualize stuff, but usually don't bother with working drawings, though I've got one client now who wants a full set of working drawings to build a new house from, so I've got to bone up on what should be in a set of working drawings and how it should be presented.
Steve
Do you have home design software for Mac OS or do you use Windows-based software with Virtual PC? I haven't been able to find Mac-native software and have been relegated to the latter option. Definitely not the prefered method!
http://www.architosh.com/ is one place to start looking.
Ken,
I'm using Vectorworks on the mac for architectural design. It's a 3D CAD program that sells for about 800 bucks. I don't know what's out there by way of cheaper options.
Steve
for 2D working drawings, you can do no better than PowerCadd on a mac.
I used it many years ago in school (PowerDraw back then) and after a few years away from the mac, I took a job w/ my current office using PowerCadd. Loved it, but wanted more 3D power (I wanted FormZ but we didn't opt for that). Alas, we jumped ship to run AutoCad Architectural Desktop or "ADT". ADT is super powerful & there is very little that I cannot do with it, but I have fond memories of simpler days of nice simple, detailed 2D drawings using PowerCadd.
Let's see, I probably still have the original disks from MacDraft circa 1985. Wonder how well it will run under Panther...
One of my favorite Mac programs was Underware, a screen saver from around 1990. The company seems to have disappeared long ago. I wonder if something like that would run/could be adapted to run under Mac X? I don't have a floppy drive (thanks to Steve Jobs...) on my G4, so I don't know if it is worth while copying the Underware disks to a CD. Any thoughts?
Casey,
OSX is a totally different beast then 9. Anything for system 9 that is in anyway tied into the system (ie: screensavers) will be useless in OSX. You might want to snoop around the linux/unix community to see if there was ever a linux/unix version of Underware. *nix programs can be pretty easily ported to OSX.
Steve
Yeah, I knew that - Mac OS X is the latest incarnation of NeXT (Steve Jobs imported his failed offshoot of NextStep rather than buy Be, which caused a little bitching in the Be operating system camp at the time.) However, I haven't run OS X long enough (having to pay attention to my real job as a SQL Data Base Analyst, which doesn't fly on Mac where I work) to know what happens with screen savers running in "Classic" mode under OS X. Since I was told that Underware worked because of some unique hooks into the earlier OS, I doubt that it would work under the Classic mode of OS X.
Edited 11/4/2003 11:41:36 PM ET by CaseyR
Casey,
Now you got my curiosity up. Maybe I'll dig up my old copy of "Flying Toasters" and see how that fares under classic. Thing is, classic only shows up if you have an OS 9 program running, so at best I think you could only get the screensaver to function if you had something up and running in calssic, which I never really use for anything, since I've got my OS 8.5 box right next to and networked to my OSX box, and the os9 box has a bigger monitor, and well, enough babbling.
Actually Jobs didn't make the decision on Be vs. Next. Gil Amelio bought the Next technology instead of Be, and Jobs came with the package, then Jobs summarily took over the whole operation, for better or for worse. Who can say where things would be if they went with Be. OSX seems to be faring well in the geek community though. The BSD kernal brings with it a built in segment of the hardcore IT community that would otherwise never give apple a second thought.
Steve
WOW. I had no idea there was such a variety of CAD software out there! I checked out the achitosh.com website. Great stuff.
Unfortunately, I'm a bit out of your league, I'm afraid. I'm a simple homeowner, looking for software to layout some remodelling plans. I was hoping to find something for $100 or so. I saw PowerDraw Lite for $250, but it looks like it's only up to OS 9. MacDraft is about the same price.
Anyone aware of software more geared towards the homeowners? It looks like Abracadbra has abandoned the Mac market with their Design your own .... line of software.
I tried that abracadabra program. I thought it was awful.
This might be a bit much, but there's an open-source CAD project for OSX:
http://www.ribbonsoft.com/qcad.html
Might want to check it out. I haven't played with it yet. Not sure if it does 3D.
shot in the dark - check eBay
Ha!
We still have my (perfectly functional) Classic, with System 6.7. Gave the keyboard to my kid to bang on, though.
didBlah, yada, whatever, Hi how are you today