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At WWDC yesterday, Apple previewed Mac OS X version 10.3 “Panther,” the next major version of Mac OS X that it says will ship by year end. Panther will include more than 100 new features including a completely new Finder -- Exposé -- offering what Apple terms a revolutionary new way to instantly see all your open windows at once. Also new is iChatAV, a complete desktop video conferencing solution for business, education and consumers. A returning feature last seen in OS 9.x is Labels - color-coding for Finder icons. 
Speaking of the Finder, Apple says Panther features a completely new one that puts the user’s favorite folders, hard drive, network servers, iDisk and removable media in one convenient location, providing one-click access to everything a user needs. The redesigned Finder also features faster search and dynamic browsing of the network for Mac, Windows and UNIX file servers. The Finder's column view has been enhanced with a live search feature that narrows the search as you type in extra search characters. The aforementioned Exposé will provide a new way to instantly view all open windows and choose any of them to be on top. Exposé, which is Based on Quartz Extreme, tiles and shrinks windows into tiny versions on the desktop to provide a visual index of all open windows, visually unshuffling overlapping windows on the Desktop into an organized view so a user can quickly find and select the window they want. Clicking on one will bring it to the front.. Exposé will also temporarily clear the desktop of all windows, so users can get to any file on the Desktop previously hidden by the open windows. iChat AV will feature full-screen, full-motion video over broadband, audio over 56K modem and a familiar easy-to-use interface. iChat will reportedly work with any Firewire-connected imaging device, and also continue to work with AOL's IM service. Apparently, OS X 10.2 users OS X 2 users will be able to buy iChatAV for for $24.00. In addition, Panther includes FileVault, a new feature that secures the contents of a home directory with strong 128-bit AES encryption. With FileVault, users can select to have their whole home directory encrypted automatically so it encrypts and decrypts files on the fly, without interrupting their work. For mobile users, FileVault provides a new level of security on the road so if anyone ever tries to access a user’s account or if their notebook is lost, important data is always protected by high-security encryption. 
Panther also includes new features that make it even easier for Macs to co-exist in Windows networks including an IPSec-based VPN for Microsoft and Cisco networks, support for ActiveDirectory and SMB-based home directories on Windows servers and enhanced Windows integration within the Finder that enables printing to shared printers. Apple claims that Mac OS X is the world’s most popular UNIX-based operating system and Panther adds system-wide advancements to UNIX-based technologies including X11 for Mac OS X, major performance improvements to NFS, a ports manager for accessing open source projects, expanded Kerberos support, an integrated IPv6 networking stack and the ability to access Quartz graphics from Python programs.
Additional new features in Panther include:
Sounds delightful, particularly Expose, although I wish they had also restored plain old windowshading of open windows as an option as well. It remains to be seen whether there will be any speed improvements, or conversely (heaven forbid) a speed penalty associated with the new features, especially for those of us with slower Macs. With the new G5s coming, the performance spread between Apple's entry-level and high-end systems will widen substantially. Apple Mac OS X version 10.3 Panther will be available by the end of this year at a suggested retail price of $129.00, so it's time to start saving up. Virtual memory and OS X From Nina Tovish Hi Charles ~ It looks like Panther is going to solve 2 of your longtime grievances with OS X. Exposé ~ BETTER than Windowshade, and provides quick access to just the desktop too! Can't wait, myself... Nina Exposé et al. sounds good. We shall see. ;-) Charles From Bob Booten You might be interested in this thread about virtual memory and OS X. The macosxhints Forums / OS X Help Requests /System /OSX virtual memory http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=12822 [Replying to the poster who started the thread]: Just out of curiosity I'd like to see your top output and the output of running vm_stat on your machine. Most likely, as suggested by Merv, your understanding is a bit off. So let me give you a bit of a rundown on how it works (bear with me here, I'm a long time intel guy justing beginning on OSX, but I'm pretty sure most of this applies). Once the world moved into the 32 bit era, things changed. Essentially, what is meant by 32 bits is the ability to use 32 address lines for the cpu. 32 address lines equates to 2^32 address, each of which holds one byte. Therefore you're talking 4,294,967,296 addressable bytes (4GB). In reality you can't use all of it, some of it is used by the system processes(such as the kernel), and some of it is shared among processes. Specific implementations are dependant on the OS, but in general all of this is true. At the minimum you'll get 2^(32-1)-1 of this addressable space for your use, PER PROCESS! This means that every process on your machine gets a minimum of 2,147,483,647 addressable bytes(or 2GB). This greatly simplifies the world for programmers (of which I am one), since we no longer care about crossing 16 bit boundaries (only 2^16 or 65,536 bytes). We write our code to allocate the memory we need and the OS takes care of our memory requests. Now this is where swap files and your true physical memory matter. The OS must provide every process on your machine with at least 2GB of addressable space. But, this 2GB is virtual. Chances are, you don't have 2GB of physical memory on your machine for every process running. But in reality it does not matter because very few processes need 2GB of physical memory. What the OS is really doing is balancing the need for physical memory with the availibility of the application. A request for memory from an application will cause a "page" of memory (4k for OSX) to be allocated from virtual memory which may or may not be from physical memory. It's up to the OS to decide where the allocation of your page request comes from. If you have sufficient free physical memory, your request will be filled with with a page from physical memory. If you have no free physical memory (or less than a page), the OS will attempt to move another application from physical memory into the swap file. The algorithm used to decide which apps memory go into the swap file is highly proprietary and OS dependant. In general, if you have an interactive OS, the current interactive apps get preference over background apps for whose memory gets swapped out(server configurations generally have the opposite). The point being, the OS will make every attempt to use physical memory to fulfill your request. If this cannot be done, OTHER, application will likley get swapped out to allow room for your application to get physical memory. Switching between apps in a low memory condition can cause what is known as thrashing. Where the OS is attempting to pull the current active apps memory into physical memory from disk, but then you switch to another app, and another app, and another app. This causes the OS to try to move each of these apps swapped memory into physical memory. Not a good situation. But this is for very low memory situations, you are not likley hitting this type of problem. Lets use a real world example to explain. Lets assume you've just logged in. The OS itself has use a certain percentage of your physical memory. Chances are, you have plenty left. Now you start a memory hog application (like MS Word), and it requests a bunch of memory. The OS likely has the available physical memory to fulfill this request, and does. A few minutes later, you Start up your email client. Your email client requests some memory, but the OS determines there is no physical memory left for your app. The OS then takes physical memory allocated to MS Word and writes it out to disk. Allowing your email app to have physical memory (since chances are it's about to be interactive). So you read your email for a few minutes, then go back to MS Word. The OS now swaps out the physical memory for your email client to the swap file, and brings in the swap file area for MS Word into physical memory. Now Switching quickly between MS Word and your mail app (in low memory conditions) would cause memory to constantly get swapped in an out of physical memory for the two apps, this is thrashing. Now lets contrast this with your comment about being able to lock an application into memory (which can be done, that is the "wired" memory). Assume you started MS Word and locked it into memory. You work with it for a while, then you wanna check your email. You email application requests memory, but there is no physical memory to fulfill it's request. The OS must fulfill this request though(assume your swap file is allowed to grow large enough) and the OS redirects your mail app to the the swap file. Your mail app is going to be dog slow now, since every read/write is going to take disk access time( in the millisecond range) vs physical memory access time(in the nanosecond range). This is going to be very noticable for you as an interactive user. I guess you will just have to trust in the fact that your OS is much better at managing your physical memory than you are. Because of the vitual memory, backed by physical memory and a swap file, your user experience is going to be much better than if you were to attempt to manager your memory on your own. Bob Booten
Hi Bob;
Thanks for the forward, which I think I was able to follow most of.
Personally, an interesting point is that my complaints about excessive pageouts and slowdowns have been based on using OS X on my 500 MHz Pismo PowerBook, with usually about a GB or less free space available on the OS X partition afte a fresh reboot.
With my iBook, which I have been using for production for a couple of weeks now, these slowdowns just aren’t happening, at least nowhere near the degree they’re experienced on the Pismo. However, there is about 4 GB free on the OS X partition on the iBook’s hard drive. I think the hard drive itself is significantly faster than the fairly sluggish one in the Pismo (both machines have 640 MB of RAM). The iBook is also faster in general and supports Quartz Extreme, which the Pismo does not.
In short, I’ve found little to complain about in this regard with the iBook, even though it’s only a 700 MHz G3.
However, OS 9 is faster than OS X on either machine.
Charles
The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here: Note: Letters to Moore's Mailbag may or may not be published at the editor's discretion. Correspondents' email addresses will NOT be published unless the correspondent specifically requests publication. Letters may be edited for length and/or context. Opinions expressed in postings to Moore's MailBag are those of the respective correspondents and not necessarily shared or endorsed by the Editor and/or Applelinks management. If you would prefer that your message not appear in Moore's Mailbag, we would still like to hear from you. Just clearly mark your message "NOT FOR PUBLICATION," and it will not be published. CM
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