One week with Panther GM.

Apple has recently announced a release date for Mac OS X 10.3. Its official release is planned for October the 24th. It looks like Build 7B85, I'm testing for more than one week, is Golden Master, although Apple is still making new builds. Newer builds are said to be made for an upgrade that will come soon after the official release of Mac OS X 10.3, let's say "before the end of the year". Anyway, like last year, we'll be sure of which rev is the Golden Master build only when the first copies are shipped.

So how is that 7B85 build?
Actually my last article answers this question, especially as regards the features, but there are a few things I had not noticed at that time.

First, I was happy to see that the new search feature is very fast, so those who have messy hard disks will be happy with the speed when searching their files.

In terms of stability, I finally managed to have some spinning wheels, some of them are endless. It looks like the all new Finder is not perfect, especially when it comes to mounting a disc image or, more generally, to use its multi-threading capabilities.

Connected to a network, Mac OS X 10.3 behaves much better than Jaguar but, once again, it's still not perfect. I noticed that I couldn't print from a Windows XP (SP1) or Windows 2000 (SP4) PC to an EPSON printer connected on the Mac. Also the Finder net browser is very cool but doesn't always see all the servers of the Network.

The fact that Apple added file system journaling is a good point and the difference in speed is not even noticeable. Now I feel that on this operating system, files are so reliably protected that the only way to lose them is to delete them or to physically damage the hard disk of your Mac. You'll probably never lose other data than your unsaved work when your Mac crashes.

I thought it was important to test the reliability of Mail.app with huge, multi-account mailboxes so I imported a mailbox with 5 accounts and more than 10 000 messages in it. I can say that the result was very positive. Mail was not only very fast but was also very reliable. I remember that I had a lot of problems with Jaguar's Mail client, it was slow, it often marked read messages as unread or sometimes didn't display the content of my mailboxes.

Boro & Itoo from of Macplus, have discovered a very cool little feature on Panther that probably very few testers noticed. An auto-completion feature that works on any application has been added to the system. To activate it, just type anywhere you want the beginning of a word, push option-esc, select the word you want on a menu of choices then push tab to validate.

To finish, I'd add that there is still a point Apple still has to improve on Mac OS X. Users using Greek language are still unable to use the Greek keyboard layout on applications that do not support Unicode and I can tell you that, except for Apple applications, rare are the third party applications that support Unicode on Mac OS X. For example Microsoft Office doesn't and it cannot even read any Greek document either. Besides, on those rare applications that do support Unicode, there is only one font that works with Greek. For me, that simply means that Apple does not find it interesting or necessary to support the language of a country of only 10 million inhabitants. Maybe they don't know that there is at least another 10 million people in the world that speak Greek and will have to switch to Windows to use Greek on their computer. Cosmix is explaining this problem very well on his blog-page that I'd suggest you to visit.

If we don't consider the last point (most of you don't need Greek support, right?), Apple has definitely done a great job with Panther, I guess it is time for a lot of professionals to switch to Mac OS X if they haven't done so already because we can now say that Mac OS X is really a lot more productive and reliable than Mac OS 9. Although there are still a few bugs, Mac OS X 10.3 is very stable for a newly completed product and it will be updated very soon after its official release. Apple made an effort to offer upgrades to recent Mac buyers which is also a very good point.