Panther - part 1: new faster Finder, new features, speed improvements, same pricing.

During the last three months, I tried to find out information on what new features and improvements Panther is going to bring to us. A lot of quite reliable sources told me that Apple wanted to make huge improvements to this upgrade. Here is some information on the development of Panther that I could get from them:

- The Finder is going to see dramatic speed improvements and better multi-threading. I couldn't comfirm if Apple was using Cocoa programming but I don't think it's impossible.
- New navigation features will be added. Some sources mentioned a set of features that would simplify document archiving and classification but did not give me further details.
- The dock may see some changes intended to make it simpler to use. New effects may appear as options. Also, commands like "Hide background applications" could be made easier to access on Panther.
- Panther will see overall speed improvements and an even more powerful Quartz Extreme. Compatibility with 64 bit processors is also expected (and already so much rumoured;-).
- SMB will be improved in terms of performance and stability. Apple has worked on the most common errors that we can encounter with SMB, in particular, some bug fixes with file names, the unmount of unavailable SMB volumes and some minor authentication issues.
- Some sources told me that printer sharing would also be quite improved. Panther will be able to see Windows shared printers and share its printers to Windows based PCs as easily as it does with Macs. Actually, these two features are already available on Jaguar but you have to deal with CUPS to make them work.
- Some rumours claimed that Apple may use the brushed metal interface for all of the system applications. My sources indicated to me that it doesn't seem to be totally decided and not very likely.
- Apple is going to add several services to .Mac members and will probably integrate them with Panther.
- An improved version of Apple X11 may be included as an optional install but it depends upon whether or not Apple has a final version ready for the release of Panther.
- Mac OS X Panther will ship with Classic, which will be a non bootable Mac OS 9. Classic will load faster but applications won't run really faster than on Jaguar (I think it's fast enough anyway).
- Panther will have the same pricing scheme as Jaguar but Apple may offer rebates for current Jaguar users and new Mac owners or special offers with a .Mac membership. As for the release date, it should also be close to last year's Jaguar release.

Sources are still giving me news on Panther's development and I'm currently trying to verify some information related to the updates of Panther's included system applications and iApps. In the part 2 of this article, I'm going to detail some features that we'll find on these applications. So stay tuned and if you got some interesting information don't hesitate to contact me.