TidBITS: Panther Answers

Article 1 of 18 in series

23 Jun 2003 | Print

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Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Springs at WWDC

Today at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs unveiled the next version of Mac OS X, codenamed Panther and scheduled to ship sometime before the end of 2003 for $130Show full article

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Today at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs unveiled the next version of Mac OS X, codenamed Panther and scheduled to ship sometime before the end of 2003 for $130. Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar was a major upgrade with numerous large and small improvements over the previous version, and from initial impressions, it appears that Panther will follow in Jaguar's footsteps. Jobs said that Apple has made over 100 major changes to Panther. Here's a brief overview, based on the information available at this point.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/>

New Finder -- Panther sports an all new, brushed metal Finder with several significant changes to standard windows that Jobs claimed were more user-centric. In particular, Apple tried to emphasize those folders that people actually use by putting them in the new Places sidebar on the left side of the window, much like albums in iPhoto or playlists in iTunes. The top part of the Places sidebar lists accessible volumes; the lower part holds your favorite folders. Clicking an item in the Places sidebar jumps to it directly. The Finder will feature new Open and Save dialogs that also use the Places sidebar; we'll see if that's sufficient to help us wake from the horrible nightmare that Open and Save dialogs have been for so long.

Labels have finally returned to the Panther Finder, as has network browsing using the Network icon that has long sat (mostly) unused at the top level of everyone's hard disk. Searching should be faster in Panther's Finder as well, and like searching in iTunes and Mail, it will refine the visible items to those that match as you type. In a fascinating twist, Apple has also added an Action menu to the toolbar of Finder windows; it simply contains the content of the contextual menu that would appear if you Control-clicked or right-clicked a selection in the Finder. That says to me that Apple is acknowledging a basic usability problem with contextual menus for many users; there's no way to know a contextual menu is available simply by looking.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/finder.html>

Lastly, a new feature called Expose (actually spelled with an accent on the final "e" and pronounced "ex-po-zay" from what little I could hear of the stuttering QuickTime webcast) aims to help us clean our cluttered Desktops. Expose offers three functions that can be invoked with a function key, by throwing the pointer into a corner of the screen, or with a button on multi-button mice. The first function uses Quartz to tile all open windows; mousing over a window displays its title, and clicking one expands it (along with all the rest) and makes it the foreground window. The second function tiles all the windows in the current application while making windows in other applications go grey; again, a click in a window activates it. The third function simply hides all open windows, providing access to the Desktop. Apple doesn't say if pressing the function key a second time will show all those hidden windows again.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/expose.html>

Network Improvements -- As is fitting for today's emphasis on the Internet and local area networks, Panther incorporates a number of changes that should make Macs even better network citizens. SMB and Active Directory support has improved, which should enable Macs to coexist on Windows networks better. IPSec-based (IP Security) virtual private networking is also included.

On the Mac-only side, Panther can automatically synchronize files with your iDisk in the background, making it easy to maintain backup copies of important files (although 100 MB of iDisk storage disappears awfully fast these days). The better iDisk integration also means easier sharing of files between computers, and Jobs claimed it works particularly well with laptops that connect only sporadically. It's basically a local folder that syncs via .Mac.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/idisk.html>

Mail 2.0 and Address Book -- Apple's bundled email client will receive a significant upgrade with Panther. Performance has reportedly improved significantly, and Mail will use Safari's HTML engine, which will help HTML rendering quality and speed. For those who subscribe to mailing lists, Mail will provide a new interface for tracking and reading discussion threads. Mail's spam filter has reportedly been improved for better accuracy, and it can take advantage of server-side spam marking tools like Spam Assassin or Brightmail. One last neat feature that previously existed only in Microsoft's Entourage: replies and forwards are linked to messages, making it easy to track what you've done to a message.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/mail.html>

Mail also has more integration with Address Book, and a number of new small features that some people may find helpful when addressing mail, such as the capability to highlight messages addressed to domains not in a "safe" list. Another interesting bit of integration - if you change some of your contact information in Address Book, a new option in that program can automatically notify all your contacts of the new information. Finally, Address Book can print labels and phone books.

User Switching and Security -- In the keynote, Steve Jobs admitted that Windows XP had trumped Mac OS X in how it handled multiple users, since in Windows XP, you don't have to quit all your applications to switch from one user to the other. That feature will be coming to Panther, and it should make Mac OS X significantly faster and easier to use for families having trouble justifying the extra work of multiple accounts. You set up fast user switching in the Accounts preferences pane, which also offers more levels of security that can be assigned to individual users.

Other security improvements include FileVault, which encrypts the entire contents of your home directory using 128-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption. It works on the fly, and is ideal for protecting files on a PowerBook or iBook. Laptop users will also appreciate a new Panther setting that requires a password whenever the Mac wakes from sleep.

Finally, a few utilities from independent developers will suffer from the addition of a new secure delete feature in Panther that writes seven passes of random data over deleted files to prevent them from being recovered.

Faxing and Preview -- With Panther, Apple is entering a mostly ignored field that has seen little decent software over the years: faxing. If you hook up your Mac's internal modem to a phone line, you can fax any document from the Print dialog to contacts in your Address Book with fax numbers. Incoming faxes can be printed, forwarded to an email address, or viewed in the new Preview application, which can now handle multi-page faxes. Preview converts black-and-white images to 8-bit grayscale using anti-aliasing and smoothing techniques, which may make the faxes easier to read on screen. It would be nice to see additional integration with Internet fax services like eFax, since no matter what Apple adds to Panther, there's no way around the annoyance of dealing with fax reception without a dedicated second phone line.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/faxing.html>

Preview has received additional improvements, particularly in terms of performance and linking. Apple claims "URL support in Preview makes short work of navigating long documents," which I hope means that it supports PDF bookmarks and links. Also supported are links to other documents and out to Internet resources. If Preview offers support for all those types of links and proves to be faster than Acrobat Reader, it may supplant Acrobat Reader as the most capable PDF browser on the Mac. Other features that would help Preview overthrow Acrobat Reader include improved text copying from PDF documents (currently tricky with Acrobat Reader) and indexed text searches.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/ preview.html>

Font Book -- Secure deletion utility developers are undoubtedly upset at Panther, and font utility developers may be as well, once they see the new Font Book. Like Suitcase and Font Reserve, Font Book helps you install, preview, search, activate, and deactivate your fonts. Activation and deactivation happen dynamically, so you don't need to relaunch applications to take advantage of the changed font sets.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/panther/font_ book.html>

The Font Panel has been enhanced to help you take advantage of font ligatures, kerning, number spacing, rendering fractions, and more. The Character Palette even lets you preview a character rendered into every available font, something that will probably be appreciated by Unicode users.

The Upgrade Question -- Steve Jobs claimed Apple has seven million active users of Mac OS X and said that the transition to Mac OS X will be done by the end of the year. I suspect that means that he thinks all of the people who are going to switch from Mac OS 9 to Mac OS X will have done so by that point, though there's no question that some people will remain with Mac OS 9 until they have reason to buy a new Mac.

As with the migration to Jaguar, I fully expect many existing Jaguar users to be unhappy about paying $130 for the upgrade to Panther, and it's entirely likely that a non-trivial percentage of users will stick with Jaguar. When I asked a roomful of shareware developers at MacHack how many users they estimated hadn't upgraded from Mac OS X 10.1 to Mac OS X 10.2, I heard numbers as high as 20 percent. That surprises me, since Jaguar is so much better than Mac OS X 10.1. Obviously, we won't know for a while how much better than Jaguar Panther really is, but I expect the number of people who consider Jaguar sufficient to be potentially even higher than the number who stuck with Mac OS X 10.1. Apple clearly expects that some people won't upgrade as well, since they're offering iChat AV for free with Panther but charging $30 for those who want to use it with Jaguar.

We'll certainly be ponying up the $130 for Panther when it comes out, so you can look forward to much more detailed coverage and thoughts about whether Panther will be worth your hard-earned cash.

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Article 2 of 18 in series

27 Oct 2003 | Print

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Default Folder X & QuicKeys X: Upgrade Before Panther!

by Matt Neuburg

Default Folder X & QuicKeys X: Upgrade Before Panther! St. Clair Software has published version 1.9.1 of their popular Open/Save dialog enhancement utility, Default Folder XShow full article

Article 3 of 18 in series

27 Oct 2003 | Print

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Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Unleashed

by Jeff Carlson

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther bounded out of its lair over the weekend, giving us the opportunity to start using the shipping version and see how it compares to what was promised by Apple at the Worldwide Developer Conference in June (see "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Springs at WWDC" in TidBITS-685)Show full article

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Mac OS X 10.3 Panther bounded out of its lair over the weekend, giving us the opportunity to start using the shipping version and see how it compares to what was promised by Apple at the Worldwide Developer Conference in June (see "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Springs at WWDC" in TidBITS-685). Apple has packed numerous improvements into this release, both on the surface and under the hood, and has also finally implemented some old favorites. Is it worth the $130 upgrade price? Read on for some of the highlights, and decide for yourself.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07242>

New Finder -- The first obvious changes appear in the Finder, which gains the same brushed metal sheen as iTunes and adds the Sidebar, a pane on the left side of every window that provides quick access to volumes and your home directory. If you don't want the Sidebar to occupy as much space, you can drag the separator bar to view as little of the contents as you want, down to just icons. If you drag the bar all the way to the left, or double-click it, the Sidebar disappears. Open and Save dialogs also include the Sidebar, simplifying navigation.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/finder/>

The Sidebar replaces, in theory, the Favorites window: drag a folder to the Sidebar to add it to the list, or drag items out of the Sidebar to remove them with the same "poof" animation used when removing items from the Dock. However, Favorites isn't completely gone, even if there's no keyboard shortcut or menu item for it. Open the Library folder in your Home directory and drag the Favorites folder to the Sidebar to reclaim your favorites.

Other improvements in the Finder include on-the-fly searching, which displays matching items as you type, the reappearance of Finder labels, and a Windows-inspired interface for switching between open applications: press Command-Tab to select the applications' icons in a row onscreen (Proteron's LiteSwitch X performs the same functionality, and the company posted an "open memo" to Apple this week, drawing attention to Apple's controversial appropriation of third-party technologies in the Mac OS).

<http://www.proteron.com/liteswitchx/ openmemo.php>

Exposé -- One surprise at WWDC was the introduction of Exposé (accented at the end and pronounced "ex-po-zay"), an innovative method of unraveling the inevitable tangle of application and Finder windows. When activated by a user-configurable shortcut key, mouse button, or dragging the pointer to a screen corner, Exposé temporarily shrinks and rearranges the windows to make them more visible. Pressing F9 resizes every window so there is no overlap; you can then click the one you want to bring to the front. F10 exposes the front-most application's windows in a similar way and dims the rest of the screen for better contrast. F11 works in the opposite fashion, zipping every window offscreen to reveal the Desktop.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/>

We were slightly skeptical of Exposé at first, but the simple and elegant implementation is starting to win us over. You can either press and release one of the shortcut keys to keep the Exposé display on screen, while you choose a window, but if you keep the shortcut key pressed, you need only mouse over your desired window and release the key to activate that window. One annoyance: Exposé doesn't display Classic windows in its thumbnail view.

Fast User Switching -- Previous versions of Mac OS X required you to completely log out if you wanted to activate another user on the same machine, which meant quitting open applications and essentially restarting your Mac, but without the startup chime. In Panther, you can have multiple users logged in simultaneously, preserving the state at which you switched to a different user. You switch among different users by choosing the desired user name from a new menu on the right side of the menu bar. For homes that share a Mac among multiple family members, Fast User Switching is a godsend, and it has already made the cost of the Panther upgrade worthwhile for me: I needed to help someone configure an application from scratch, so I was able to quickly go through the steps using a brand new user, switching from testing to the email I was writing.

For pure eye-candy tastiness, Fast User Switching is likely to be a feature that many people will try out, even if they don't end up using it frequently. Instead of just displaying another user's Desktop, the environment graphically rotates as if each user belongs to one side of a cube, at least on my 15-inch PowerBook G4; it just switches on my Titanium PowerBook G4 and Adam's iBook. I haven't had a chance to see how the 3D metaphor works with more than six users; it would be swell to have a new cube fly in from a point in space, but I doubt Apple has extended the visual metaphor that far.

I have noticed that some applications behave differently when you switch between users. iChat automatically goes offline, but logs back into the AIM network when you return. Similarly, iTunes stops playing music, but unfortunately it doesn't start playing again when you're back. Also, be careful restarting when other users are active; if they have unsaved work and you can't access their accounts, they'll lose their changes (you need an administrator password to do this).

FileVault -- Responding to the security needs of corporations and privacy-minded individuals, Panther introduces FileVault, a feature that encrypts the contents of your Home folder using AES-128 (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption. After FileVault is enabled, you can still use items in your Home folder as you normally would, but they're encrypted and decrypted on the fly as you open and close them. This makes it extremely difficult for someone to access your data, such as if your laptop is lost or stolen.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/filevault/>
<http://csrc.nist.gov/CryptoToolkit/aes/>

However, even ignoring the fact that several of the Take Control authors experienced data loss with FileVault while testing beta releases of Panther, FileVault has a serious architectural limitation in that it creates one large file to house your Home items. For many of us, that file will be humongous (as in many gigabytes), since the Home folder by default contains files such as digital photos, iMovie media files, and the iTunes library. This is a problem for two main reasons.

Even a small amount of data corruption due to a failing hard drive or other problem could render everything in your Home folder inaccessible. Talk about putting all your eggs in one basket...
The smallest change to any file in your Home folder will cause the modification date of the entire FileVault file to change, and backup utilities such as Retrospect will copy the whole thing. (Dantz has listed some known issues with Panther and FileVault on their Web site.)

<http://www.dantz.com/index.php3?SCREEN=kbase& amp;ACTION=KBASE&id=28093>

FileVault isn't a bad idea, but it scares me (and everyone else at TidBITS) silly; I can't imagine entrusting all my data to that single file, much less screwing up my backup strategy to accommodate it. Apple should modify FileVault so you can encrypt only specific folders, thus letting users protect only sensitive data, rather than wasting time and effort on other mostly innocuous files.

Font Book -- The Mac has always been on top of typography, but managing fonts has been persistently cumbersome. Font Book is a good step in the right direction, giving most users more control over fonts without having to wonder if they're copying font files to the correct Fonts folder. You can enable or disable fonts, group typefaces into categories, and search for fonts in the same manner as in the Finder or iTunes. Graphics professionals will likely choose to stick with a font management utility such as Suitcase X or Font Reserve, but for most people Font Book provides enough control.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/fontbook/>

The tricky part of using Font Book is figuring out its rules for enabling and disabling fonts, since you'll see different results depending on whether you disable a font when it's selected in All Fonts or in a particular collection. Matt Neuburg devotes several pages to this topic in "Take Control of Customizing Panther."

<http://www.tidbits.com/takecontrol/panther/ customizing.html>

Virtual Private Network (VPN) Connections -- Apple has been toiling behind the scenes on technologies that don't necessarily include splashy graphics or an improved user interface. Case in point: built-in VPN support, which many companies use to communicate safely with employees who travel or telecommute. VPN connections essentially capture all of the ports on a machine and bundle them up into an encrypted tunnel to another computer somewhere on a local network or elsewhere on the Internet. Because all data entering and leaving the machine is encrypted, and there's only a single point of entry or departure - the VPN connection - you've simultaneously reduced the potential of machines being attacked or compromised while eliminating networking snooping whether on a wired or wireless connection. Using the Internet Connect application, you can configure either L2TP-over-IPSec or PPTP connections.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/newfeatures/ systemadministrators.html>

On the other side of the data pipe, Mac OS X 10.3 Server has both kinds of VPN services built in, making it relatively simple and inexpensive for a small office to hook up a Panther server machine and use the Panther VPN clients to secure their wireless connection.

Should You Upgrade? A major release of any operating system brings with it a number of impressive new features as well as the certainty of glitches that need to be worked out, and Panther is no different.

For example, TidBITS Contributing Editor Glenn Fleishman and I, both recent purchasers of new 15-inch PowerBook G4s, discovered that Panther seems to be persnickety about RAM. The third-party generic RAM we installed seems to be the cause of problems (in my case, Panther would not even run on a completely new installation on a separate partition, and I got repeated system freezes on my main partition installed with the Archive and Install option). Swapping in the original 512 MB of RAM that came with my PowerBook seemed to solve the problem. (Upgrade tip: don't immediately sell your original RAM on eBay.)

Also, a number of users are reporting that external FireWire drives that are connected when Panther is restarted can become irrevocably corrupted, so make sure you have offline backups of data on external drives before (and while) using them with Panther. And, as with every Mac OS update, some third-party applications and utilities will require updating before they work properly under Panther - be sure to check the Web sites of those products to see if any essential program is Panther-ready.

That said, Panther has a lot to offer. I've been impressed not only by the number of new features, but by the sense that Mac OS X is becoming more refined as it matures (perhaps because I remember when it was an awkward toddler). Even as extra bullet points are added to the feature list, I get the sense that just as much effort is being applied to making this Unix-driven system user-friendly.

Plus, Panther just feels faster and more responsive than Jaguar. Granted, I'm now using one of Apple's fastest laptops, so I'll be curious to see how my previous 400 MHz Titanium PowerBook G4 runs after upgrading. But I'm starting to see reports that indicate Apple's engineers continue to optimize Mac OS X's code to squeeze out better performance.

In the end, the upgrade question comes down to what sort of a user you are. Adventurous early adopters should of course upgrade to Panther immediately; it's too much fun to explore and play with the new features. More cautious users might want to hold off a bit, not necessarily for a 10.3.1 release, but just until more of the glitches have been identified and can thus be avoided. And unlike the upgrade from 10.1 to 10.2, which we considered essential, we can see some non-demanding users sticking with Jaguar from inertia alone.

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Article 4 of 18 in series

27 Oct 2003 | Print

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Interesting Bits of Panther

by Adam C. Engst

Jeff Carlson has walked you through the marquee features of Apple's new Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, but my experience with the previous version, Jaguar, was that the changes that made the difference for me were more subtleShow full article

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Jeff Carlson has walked you through the marquee features of Apple's new Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, but my experience with the previous version, Jaguar, was that the changes that made the difference for me were more subtle. So let's take a look at some of these subtle changes in Panther and how they work.

Timed Startup/Sleep/Shutdown Returns -- Yet one more feature of Mac OS 9 has reappeared in Mac OS X. The Energy Saver preference pane now contains a Schedule tab in which you can set schedules for the Mac to start up, sleep, or shut down. Now you can have your Mac ready and waiting for you in the morning without having to wait for it to start up manually. Initial testing and reports show slightly sporadic success (my iBook refused to sleep at the specified time, but did wake up appropriately, and a reader on TidBITS Talk reported that his Mac didn't shut down when it should have).

As an aside, if you find the new organization of the icons in System Preferences confusing, consider using the View menu to choose a specific preference pane or choose Organize Alphabetically to hide Apple's categories. These viewing options aren't new to Panther, but I hadn't wanted them until I found myself confused by some of the new organization. Annoyingly for those of us on slower Macs, Panther's System Preferences application now quits when you close its window, making it slower to start up if you need it again later.

Network Browser Done Right -- Despite excellent support for file sharing and networking, Apple has long had terrible interfaces for finding and connecting to network volumes. First the Chooser, then the Network Browser in Mac OS 9 (did anyone really bother with that?), and then the lousy Connect to Server dialog in Mac OS X. Panther finally moves in the right direction, using the previously superfluous Network icon at the top level of Finder windows as the starting point for network browsing for both Mac and Windows shared volumes (quite a number of which seem to be available in the hotel for the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, where I currently am). Select one and click the Connect button that appears to bring up a login dialog and from then on, that volume shows the full file hierarchy underneath.

Keyboard Shortcut Quirks -- In the Keyboard & Mouse preference pane, Panther now enables you to change the keyboard shortcuts for many global actions, such as taking a screenshot. That's great, but what's even better is that you can also add keyboard shortcuts to menu items in at least some applications. I couldn't get them to work in Eudora or iTunes in my initial testing, although they did work in Safari and System Preferences. Interestingly, when I made an All Applications shortcut that I intended to choose Eudora from the Recent Items submenu of the Apple menu, it didn't work, but it did attach properly a bookmark I had in Safari for the Eudora Web site; having keyboard shortcuts for Safari bookmarks will be helpful. Also, as I learned in Matt Neuburg's "Take Control of Customizing Panther," if the menu item in question has an ellipsis, you must use trial-and-error to determine if it's a true ellipsis (Option-;) or three periods. The moral of the story? Useful and welcome as this new feature is, don't give up on macro utilities like QuicKeys X and Keyboard Maestro (since they can string sequences together, run AppleScript scripts, type text, click buttons, and so much more.

<http://www.cesoft.com/products/qkx.html>
<http://www.keyboardmaestro.com/>

Disk Utility Engulfs Others -- Who knew that Disk Utility had imperialistic leanings? Previously, Disk Utility was essential for repairing damaged disks, fixing permissions, and initializing and partitioning disks. In Panther, however, Disk Utility has taken over the disk image functions of Disk Copy, so you can use it to make and burn disk images. Not stopping there, Disk Copy has also overrun the territory of the free Carbon Copy Cloner, since you can now use the controls in the Restore tab to make an exact duplicate of a disk, or restore a disk from an existing disk image. For the many people disappointed that it was impossible to duplicate a Mac OS X volume by merely dragging it, as was possible in Mac OS 9, this feature should be quite welcome. While you're in Disk Utility, note that you can click the Enable Journaling button for disks that don't currently have journaling turned on. Without going into details, with journaling on, your Mac can start up more quickly after a crash.

Force Quit This! Much as I like being able to force quit a recalcitrant application, I hate going through the Force Quit dialog because of the extra steps of opening and closing it. I often Option-click the misbehaving application's Dock icon and choose Force Quit from there, but in Panther, you can now force quit just the frontmost application - without even seeing the Force Quit dialog - by pressing Command-Shift-Option-Escape. That shortcut may also help in situations where the Force Quit dialog doesn't draw in front of the dead application.

Classic Interface Tweaks -- Apple isn't likely to change Classic, even though it might be nice to have a saved state option, much like Virtual PC offers. But Panther does offer some improvements in how you interact with Classic. In the Classic preference pane's Start/Stop tab, there's now a checkbox for Show Classic Status in Menu Bar. The Classic menu that appears in your menu bar provides a quick way to start and stop Classic, but more important, it also offers an Apple Menu Items submenu that contains the contents of your Classic environment's Apple menu. Since that also includes control panels by default, it means you no longer must launch a Classic application just to access a control panel. Also in the Classic preference pane is a new Memory/Versions tab that shows the names, versions, and memory usage of Classic applications that could be handy if you're stuck using a RAM-hungry Classic application.

iPhoto Integration Tips -- It sometimes seems as though Apple isn't paying much attention to iPhoto, though I hope we'll see an iPhoto 3.0 at Macworld Expo in January that will address the significant performance and scalability problems of the current version. My hopes for improvement have been raised by the new integration of iPhoto and the operating system in Panther. In the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane, you can select any iPhoto album to use photos in it for your Desktop and your screen saver, which may be easier than setting up the same thing through iPhoto. However, if you make a new album in iPhoto, the Desktop & Screen Saver preference pane won't see it until you quit System Preferences and relaunch. Also, one tip: when selecting a new photo for your Desktop, use the Exposé Desktop-revealing shortcut for a quick preview.

Submit Bug Report -- Kudos to Apple on this one. When an application crashes in Panther, a dialog appears with a Submit Bug Report button. You can add more information to the report and then send it to Apple over the Internet. Though I haven't tried to watch the network traffic, Apple states clearly in Mac Help that no personal information is included in the report. User-submitted bug reports (such as those that come from Safari's bug button) have a lower priority than developer-submitted bug reports that go directly into Apple's bug database, but multiple Apple employees have assured me that the user reports are processed and evaluated. In the future, I hope to see a way that independent developers can also receive these automatically generated bug reports when their applications crash.

Network Status Display -- Those of us who have somewhat complicated networks with multiple connections (built-in Ethernet, AirPort, modem) and even potentially multiple Internet connections (okay, I admit that's weird), will appreciate the new Network Status display in the Network preference pane. It shows all your connections and provides a plain English description of the status of each connection. You can also double-click one to edit its settings.

More Bits and Pieces -- I'm sure we'll all be discovering more useful details about Panther in the coming weeks, so post any interesting things you learn to TidBITS Talk. I'll try to keep up with posts, but I'm at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference all week, so I may not be able to keep posts flowing as regularly as I'd like.

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Article 5 of 18 in series

03 Nov 2003 | Print

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Security Update 2003-10-28 Released

by Jeff Carlson

Security Update 2003-10-28 Released -- Although Mac OS X 10.3 Panther fixes a number of security-related flaws that existed in previous versions of Mac OS X, Apple has wasted no time in releasing Security Update 2003-10-28 via Software Update last weekShow full article

Article 6 of 18 in series

03 Nov 2003 | Print

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Fixes Available for Some Panther FireWire Troubles

by Jeff Carlson

When a new version of an operating system is released, we expect to run into bugs or incompatibilities that didn't get shaken out during the testing phaseShow full article

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When a new version of an operating system is released, we expect to run into bugs or incompatibilities that didn't get shaken out during the testing phase. Unfortunately, a particularly nasty problem has surfaced: Mac OS X 10.3 Panther can, in certain circumstances, completely destroy the data on an external FireWire drive. Disk recovery utilities such as DiskWarrior and Norton Disk Doctor have reportedly been incapable of resurrecting the disks.

Last week, Apple identified a problem with FireWire 800 drives using the Oxford 922 bridge chipset with firmware version 1.02. Based on anecdotal reports on the Web, restarting the Mac with the drive attached triggers the problem; Apple recommends that you immediately eject and disconnect any FireWire 800 drive connected to a Mac running Panther.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/ firewire800specialmessage.html>

The situation has provoked a flurry of firmware updates and finger-pointing. Drive manufacturers such as WiebeTech, LaCie, Other World Computing, and FireWire Direct have released firmware updates for their products (unfortunately, firmware updates are vendor-specific, so contact your drive's vendor). You must install the firmware update using a Mac running an older version of Mac OS X.

<http://www.wiebetech.com/techsupport.html>
<http://www.lacie.com/support/drivers/>
<http://eshop.macsales.com/Reviews/Framework.cfm ?page=/hardwareandnews/oxford/ oxfordandpanther.html>
<http://www.firewiredirect.com/site/ panther.shtml>

In response to Apple's announcement, Oxford Semiconductor issued its own statement, pointing out that the problem lies in Apple's implementation of FireWire in Panther and not the 922 chipset, since Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar systems aren't affected.

<http://www.oxsemi.com/>

In addition, users are reporting that the problem is not limited to FireWire 800 drives; a fellow Mac author was bitten by the problem using a FireWire 400 drive with the Oxford 911 chipset. For the time being, we recommend keeping Panther away from any FireWire drives until this issue is resolved. If you must use an external FireWire drive in Panther, be sure to mount the drive manually after the Mac has started up, and dismount it manually before restarting. And for goodness sake, make sure you're backing up carefully, preferably to CD or DVD, or over a network.

If you were unfortunate and did lose data to this problem, there's at least some hope of recovering your critical data. We've heard from several sources that Prosoft Engineering's Data Rescue X has had some success in recovering files, sometimes after erasing the disk with Disk Utility (which just clears the directory, scary as that seems). Jay Nelson at Design Tools Monthly also tells us that Prosoft is offering $10 off to people suffering data loss due to Panther; use code PAN911 when ordering.

<http://www.prosoftengineering.com/products/data _rescue.php>
<http://www.design-tools.com/>

Alternatively, our friends at DriveSavers tell us they've been successful in recovering data from drives that experienced this problem. Better still, DriveSavers is offering a discount to customers who have lost data as a result of the specific Panther and FireWire 800 issue. If you plan to send your drive in to DriveSavers or a similar company, do not attempt to restore data using disk utilities; that could exacerbate the problem and make it less likely that your critical data will be recovered. (I can personally recommend DriveSavers, which once helped me recover a failed hard disk; see "DriveSavers to the Rescue" in TidBITS-495).

<http://www.drivesavers.com/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/05530>

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Article 7 of 18 in series

10 Nov 2003 | Print

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WPA Weakness Discovered, but Easily Solved

by Glenn Fleishman

WPA Weakness Discovered, but Easily Solved -- Following last week's article about the implementation of WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) in AirPort Extreme cards and base stations (see "AirPort 3.2 Update Adds New Security Options" in TidBITS-704), a security expert alerted me to a weakness in choosing keys for the WPA systemShow full article

Article 8 of 18 in series

10 Nov 2003 | Print

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Panther Application Improvements

by Jeff Carlson

So you've installed Panther, started to get used to the new Finder, and worn the ink off the F9 key showing off Expose to your friends. Isn't there more to Mac OS X 10.3? In TidBITS-703, I looked at some of Panther's marquee features, while Adam poked around the corners of Apple's newest operating system (see "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Unleashed" and "Interesting Bits of Panther")Show full article

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So you've installed Panther, started to get used to the new Finder, and worn the ink off the F9 key showing off Expose to your friends. Isn't there more to Mac OS X 10.3? In TidBITS-703, I looked at some of Panther's marquee features, while Adam poked around the corners of Apple's newest operating system (see "Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Unleashed" and "Interesting Bits of Panther"). In this article, I want to look at some of the application and utility changes that give Panther some of its sheen. If you're still deciding whether or not to upgrade, hopefully this information will help you decide if Panther is right for you.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07415>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07416>

Mail -- Apple's Mail application continues to improve under Panther. Version 1.3 adds a convenient view for tracking threaded messages, improves spam filtering, and offers better HTML rendering thanks to Safari's rendering engine. To help prevent improperly addressed outgoing messages, the Safe Addressing feature flags addresses that don't belong to a domain you specify. This feature could be worthwhile in an organization that wants to avoid sending proprietary information outside the local network. Note that you can specify multiple domains in Mail's preferences, even though only one field is available to enter them.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/mail/>

For some people, however, the big news in Mail is support for working with Microsoft Exchange servers, including non-email-related content using an Outlook Web Access Server (also known as an Internet Information Services, or IIS, server).

Also new is better integration with Address Book and iChat AV: any message from an iChat buddy that you've defined in Address Book includes a green indicator when the buddy is online and her status is set to Available (nothing appears if the status is set to Away). Double-clicking the indicator initiates a chat in iChat.

Address Book -- As one of the main components for Mail and iChat, Address Book has been expanded, too. Its iChat integration is similar to Mail, with an indicator appearing when a buddy is online and available.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ addressbook/>

Address Book adds several custom fields, including Prefix, Suffix, and Dates (the default is Anniversary, but you can customize it). A series of relationship fields has been added, so you can list relations such as Spouse, Sister, Brother, Friend, Assistant, etc. One thing that confused me initially is that the Job Title field is no longer included as a blank field when you edit a record; you must now select it from the Add Field submenu of the Card menu.

Unfortunately, a nasty and obvious bug still exists in this new version: if you're editing a contact and need to undo what you typed into a field, the entire contact reverts back to the state before you started edit it, wiping out any other fields that you changed or entered. That flub eliminated Address Book's usefulness for me in Jaguar, but I assumed that something so obvious would have been fixed in Panther. Perhaps no one is actually using Address Book?

iChat AV 2.0 -- Not much has changed between the iChat AV beta and iChat AV 2.0 (see "iSight Eyes iChat AV" in TidBITS-685). You can now specify a location where received files will be stored, and you can block users on a Rendezvous network from seeing your email and AIM addresses.

<http://www.apple.com/ichat/>
<http://db.tidbits.com/article/07243>

Perhaps the most significant news is that the iChat AV beta is set to expire at the end of the year, so Jaguar users will need to either upgrade to Panther or pay $30 to take advantage of audio and video chatting. Unfortunately, that counts for iSight owners using Jaguar; even though Apple bills the $150 iSight as the "eyes and ears" of iChat AV, the software is not included with the iSight.

<http://www.apple.com/isight/>

Help Viewer -- I've set up a hotkey so that pressing Control-E brings up Eudora - a combination I use several dozen times each day. On another Mac running Jaguar where I don't have QuicKeys X installed, this combination launches Help Viewer, but only after an interminable wait.

Panther doesn't use Control-E to launch Help Viewer, but even if it did, I'd be elated: it launches quickly! It runs smoothly! I find myself actually turning to Apple's help system when I have a question about something, rather than making a knee-jerk Google search. Give it a try.

Faxing -- Tired of fighting with bad fax software? (See "FaxSTF Pro Echoes Sad State of Fax Software" in TidBITS-476). Although I try to avoid faxing whenever possible, there are times when I need to send a fax, which involves standing over the fax machine in our office, hand-feeding it one page at a time so it doesn't jam and make me start over from page one.

<http://db.tidbits.com/article/05350>
<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/faxing/>

I'm guessing someone at Apple became fed up with FaxSTF, which has shipped with new Macs for years, because Mac OS X now includes a basic option to send and receive faxes in Panther. Click a Fax button in any print dialog, specify a recipient from your Address Book, enter cover page information, and click Fax (this assumes that your Mac's modem is connected to a available phone line).

Panther can also receive faxes, using a few settings in the Print & Fax preference pane. It can print incoming faxes or email them to an address you specify, presumably as a PDF file, though I haven't tested this feature yet.

Here's a quick faxing tip: When you're sending a fax, an icon for your connection (such as Internal Modem) appears in the Dock. If the job doesn't go through and you accidentally close the window belonging to the connection, the interface disappears. To get it back, don't bother searching for a fax application as I did; instead, launch Printer Setup Utility from the Utilities folder of your Applications folder, and choose Show Fax List from the View menu.

I'm sure people with more serious faxing needs might opt for a more sophisticated program such as Smile Software's Page Sender (with which I've had limited experience on an old iMac set up at the office for receiving faxes). But for those of us forced to send only the occasional big, bitmapped, semi-legible picture to people who can't deal with email attachments, Mac OS X's fax implementation looks promising.

<http://www.smilesoftware.com/pagesender.html>

Preview -- Apple's Swiss Army Knife of PDF and image viewing and conversion, Preview, gains a much needed performance boost in Panther. In addition to launching and displaying pages faster, Preview beefs up its PDF features by adding an indexed text search capability and PDF bookmark and linking support for easier internal document navigation.

<http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/preview/>

Preview can also now open raw PostScript or EPS files and print them to any cheap inkjet printer, something that previously required an expensive PostScript-based laser printer.

Zip Compression in the Finder -- A quiet addition to Panther is the capability to create .zip archives in the Finder. The Windows world has pretty much standardized on the .zip format, so this becomes an easy way to transfer files across platforms (although Aladdin makes StuffIt Expander for Windows, it's not nearly as commonly available on Windows machines). Select one or more files in the Finder and choose "Create Archive of [filename]" from the File menu or from the contextual menu (Control-click to bring this up).

<http://www.stuffit.com/win/expander/>

Internet Preferences -- Finally, I want to point to a bit of reorganization that has prompted several people I know to scratch their heads. Under Jaguar, you could change the default Web browser and email client by going to the Internet preference pane. In Panther, however, the Internet preference pane is replaced by the .Mac preference pane.

Instead, in a move that I'm sure only makes sense in the marketing hallways at Apple, you must configure your default email and Web applications from within Safari and Mail. Launch Mail, go to its preferences, click the General icon, and choose an application from the Default Email Reader pop-up menu. Similarly, a Default Web Browser pop-up menu appears in Safari's General preferences.

What if you want to configure helper applications for other protocols? Turn to Monkeyfood's freeware More Internet preference pane, which uses Internet Config to provide a single interface to all your protocol helpers, something that was previously accessible most easily through Internet Explorer's preference in the Protocol Helpers pane.

<http://www.monkeyfood.com/software/moreinternet />

Panting for Panther? Have you made the switch to Mac OS X 10.3, or are you still pondering the path to Panther? Go to the TidBITS Web site and scroll down to answer our poll question: "When do you plan to upgrade your main Mac to Mac OS X 10.3 Panther?"

<http://www.tidbits.com/>

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Article 9 of 18 in series

17 Nov 2003 | Print

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New Panther Language Features

by Tom Gewecke

With Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Apple made sweeping changes to the operating system's language handling and internationalization features, which are key to the Mac's acceptance throughout much of the world and for many people who regularly work in multiple languagesShow full article

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With Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar, Apple made sweeping changes to the operating system's language handling and internationalization features, which are key to the Mac's acceptance throughout much of the world and for many people who regularly work in multiple languages. Three weeks of working with the foreign language capabilities of Mac OS X 10.3 Panther reveals a number of interesting new features. Although the changes are not as great as those we saw in Jaguar - and a couple new bugs have been introduced - the experience is on balance overwhelmingly positive.

Input Improvements -- When it comes to entering text in other languages, Panther features a number of welcome additions, including 14 new languages (with input keyboards and fonts), raising the total number to over 50. Panther adds Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Serbian, Dari, Pashto, Uzbek, Armenian, Cherokee, Faroese, Northern Sami, Inuktitut, and Welsh. Also new are some new keyboards (often QWERTY or "Extended" versions) for languages that existed in Jaguar. Some people could be confused by an inability to access non-Roman characters in Cherokee and Inuktitut. The trick is that you must activate Caps Lock to access non-Roman characters. Why? I'm told that's what "native users" expect.

Apple also revamped the input methods for Asian scripts (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) for the first time in a decade or so. The changes are primarily cosmetic though, with the old "pencil" menus now at the bottom of the "flag" menu. That said, the Japanese input method, Kotoeri, is thoroughly reorganized, with the six input options formerly buried in the "pencil" menu now listed separately in the "flag" menu, and the old "operations palette" gone. Unfortunately, Chinese users had a long wish list of input features that weren't implemented in Panther.

In Panther, the venerable Key Caps application has disappeared entirely, being replaced with the floating Keyboard Viewer palette, which has no text input field but which types characters clicked on its graphical keyboard directly into the frontmost window. Another new floating Input Mode palette shows activated keyboards. Apple also modified the keyboard shortcuts for switching scripts and keyboards in ways that some people will find more efficient (but you still cannot disable using Command-Space, which some applications want to use for a different function, to switch between input scripts).

Display Improvements -- Panther also offers a number of improvements on the display side, including the squashing of several bugs in Jaguar relating to the display of Devanagari and Arabic text. Most notably, though, Apple's Mail can finally set the character set encoding for outgoing messages. This is a critical addition because, left to its own devices, Mail often chose the wrong encoding, resulting in messages that nobody could read. The encoding list for both incoming and outgoing messages is extensive, and if the one you need isn't listed in the Language tab of the International preference pane, just click the Edit button and add it.

Panther now selects default fonts according to the priorities set in the Languages preference pane, so there should be less need to disable fonts to prevent inappropriate use. For instance, if you have Chinese above Japanese in the Language preference pane's list, Panther should use Chinese fonts in preference over Japanese, even if another language is actually first in the list. One caveat: it's possible that this new font fallback logic may require application support, so it may not be in effect in all applications yet. The number of languages supported for such prioritization and sorting operations has been increased to over 100, up from 64 in Jaguar (send me email if you want a list).

The Character Palette (accessible by choosing Characters from the Action menu - the "gear wheel" pop-up menu - in the Font palette) has a new pane that shows all the variations among fonts having a specific character, which is very useful for non-Roman scripts (it's also an extremely cool way to see how a specific character looks in different fonts). Also, you can now access special capabilities of advanced fonts relating to ligatures, diacritics, glyph variants, and other features. Select the desired font in the Font palette and choose Typography from the Action menu.

Lastly, the Date/Time/Numbers tabs in Jaguar's International preference pane have been replaced by a new Formats tab, which supports many more locales for the ways these items are expressed.

Eh? What Was That You Said? As welcome as the improvements discussed above are, Panther doesn't address some of the limitations present in Jaguar, and it also seems to have introduced some new bugs.

Despite all the new keyboards, Panther doesn't sport any new system languages. I expected that Apple would at least add Russian, since Apple Computer Russia used to provide a Russian localization for both Mac OS X 10.1 and 10.2 as a separate download. Greek users will also be disappointed at the lack of a Greek localization. Note that you must perform a custom install if you do not want all the system localizations, or if you do want all the available fonts. However, you can add the system localizations and "Fonts for Additional Languages" afterwards by running the appropriate installers from the second and third Panther installation CDs.

<http://www.apple.ru/>

In the category of actual defects, a text bug makes it impossible to input certain accented characters using the U.S. (and other) "Extended" keyboards in Cocoa programs. The Simplified Chinese input system has a new pinyin engine which doesn't deal correctly with certain input combinations. And Mac OS X still does not work correctly with Greek in certain OpenType fonts like Adobe Minion Pro.

The significant improvements in Panther unfortunately cannot change the fact that AppleWorks, all Microsoft products for the Mac (aside from MSN Messenger and the MSN 8 integrated browser), along with several important desktop publishing and Web publishing products are not yet Unicode-savvy, and thus cannot handle a number of languages. But this situation is bound to improve with time, as can be seen by the recent updates of Adobe InDesign CS and Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. Also, new programs like the word processor Mellel can help fill the gap.

<http://www.macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/>
<http://www.adobe.com/products/golive/main.html>
<http://www.redlers.com/>

Additional Info -- For more extensive information on Mac OS language issues, visit the Multilingual Mac and Chinese-Mac Web sites.

<http://homepage.mac.com/thgewecke/mlingos9.html>
<http://www.yale.edu/chinesemac/>

Article 10 of 18 in series

05 Jan 2004 | Print

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A Slew of Apple Software Updates

by Adam C. Engst

We weren't the only ones in a mad rush toward the end of the year, and some of Apple's engineers probably enjoyed their holiday breaks more after shipping a variety of updatesShow full article

Most Popular Articles

Recent TidBITS Talk Discussions

Series: Panther Answers

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Springs at WWDC

Default Folder X & QuicKeys X: Upgrade Before Panther!

Mac OS X 10.3 Panther Unleashed

Interesting Bits of Panther

Security Update 2003-10-28 Released

Fixes Available for Some Panther FireWire Troubles

WPA Weakness Discovered, but Easily Solved

Panther Application Improvements

New Panther Language Features

A Slew of Apple Software Updates