Cool Mac Gear

An all readers' letters edition of OS X Odyssey today.

RE: Panther on G4s

George Woodrow III

I am sending this e-mail on a G4 PowerBook running the developer's preview of Panther. I can assure you that Panther is a big speed improvement over Jaguar for many things.

The only negative I see at the mooment is battery life, but this is to be expected for beta software (the developer preview for Jaguar had the same problem).

The improvements highlited by Steve Jobs are all real and functional, and work quite well on the G4. When I am back from WWDC, I will check the preview on a G3, and let you know.

George Woodrow

Thanks for the report, George.

I would also be very interested in hearing how things go on the G3.

Charles

Comments on comments (re: Panther)

From Charles Martin

Charles:

Thought I'd jump in with a couple of comments to reply to the concerns brought up by your readers.

First, Dan Johnson's letter. Yes, Panther has faxing ability built right into the OS. It works exactly like printing. Also, I chatted (iChatAV ROCKS HARD!) with a friend at the WWDC who said he was running Panther on his 600MHz G3 iBook. He said that Finder operations (particularly "sheets" and the "system preferences" switching) was WAAAY faster than Jaguar. He added that Expose and Fast User Switching work EXACTLY as they did in the demo, even on machines that do NOT use Quartz Extreme. He was pretty excited.

According to him, the requirements for Panther are identical to the requirements for Jaguar, so that's good news for original iBook, original iMac, B&W and beige G3 owners who were worried. Of course he's referring to the requirements for the WWDC Panther *preview*, so the finished product COULD have different requirements, but it's pretty unlikely since Apple wants everyone to pony up another $129.

Second, Peter da Silva's letter asking about the metal interface. I suppose the answer to that is that it's "mandatory," but of course several third-party apps already exist to change it if you don't like it. *All* Apple interface elements now are just XML, so anybody who wanted to learn some rudimentary XML could customise the interface elements all they want if they are so inclined.

I hope that helps out your readers.

_Chas_

The CPU speed wars are over. We won.
http://www.apple.com/powermac/

All good to hear, Chas.

Thanks!

Charles

New Panther Finder

From Steven Reaume

Hello Mr. Moore.

Regarding Peter da Silva's question yesterday in Odyssey:

"OK, there's a new Finder. OK, it's nifty. Fine. Its also 'metal' themed, and it chews up a lot of screen space with all those big window borders and sections. So... Is it mandatory or optional. Can you still use the old interface?"

Jeff Szuhay writes over at the PowerBook Zone:

"If you don't like the new Finder, there is a title bar button that eliminated the toolbar stuff and gives a very, very simple content view. Nice."

you can find all of his comments at:

http://www.pbzone.com/wwdc03/wwdc03.shtml

This isn't exactly the answer, but it at least gets rid of the "Training Wheels" side section of the new finder.

Regards.

Sounds good. Steven. Thanks for the link.

Charles

Wells Fargo and Safari 1.0

From John Konopka

Charles,

I have used Safari on Wells Fargo Bank's site without any problem. However, the site advises it will not support "beta" browsers. This advisory was put up after Safari first came out. I emailed WF and told them that Safari was no longer beta and that they should upgrade their web page. We went back and forth a little then I got an interesting email from them stating that they knew that Safari was no longer beta but that they would not list Safari as a supported browser although the site would work with Safari.

It was interesting that they mentioned Safari by name and that they said their site would work with it though they would not officially say so.

Take Care,
John Konopka

Hi John;

Very interesting. I smell anti-Mac prejudice and Wintel jingoism on the part of their IT people.

Also see Jack Russell's letter immediately below.

Charles

Banking with Safari

From Jack Russell

"On the other hand, if you're still using Internet Explorer, isn't it time you checked out Safari? (One caveat: some online banking and financial services sites are still problematical for Safari, so check out how yours works before trashing IE. Personally, I use three Web banking sites. One works fine with Safari, but for the other two I still need to resort to iCab. I don't use IE)"

Just under the FYI category. If you download the freeware: Safari Enhancer it turns on the debug menu and gives you a "user agent" menu to tell Safari to pretend it's a different browser. I just select MSIE Windows and the two banks I had that would not work, work just fine.

Very nicely, my regular bank: Wells Fargo, adopted Safari as a supported browser, so I don't need the trick there. For my other two banks and one brokerage house I do. Safari Enhancer nicely lets me handle all those without ever having to use another browser.

Great column as always.
Jack Russell

Thanks. Helpful tip. You and John konopka have different impressions of WF's Safari policy.

??

Charles

Safari Mail To

From David Johnson

Charles

There has been some discussion on MacFixit about not having a Mail To operation in Safari. Today, they posted a JavaScript that can be highlighted and drug to the Menu Bar to created a Mail To button that uses the default mail app to send an email from Safari.

Thought it might be of interest. I didn't know if you had seen it either.

David

Thanks for the info, David.

Charles

Re: Safari 1.0 Final

From Charles Schoenfeld

Dear Charles,

You wrote:
"I haven't noticed any major differences from beta 2"

I'm in what may be an uncommon position to notice differences. For the last few months, I have been designing a web site with some fairly complex javascript & CSS behaviors. It works in IE, it works in Mozilla, but even the most recent Safari beta couldn't render it correctly. Because Safari is such a nifty browser in all other respects, it really bugged me that the only site that gave me problems was my own!

Anyway, Safari 1.0 finally displays my pages correctly -- which means that they've improved handling of either JavaScript, CSS, or both. Considering the prevalence of those technologies, I have to consider that more than a minor tweak or bugfix. (Granted, I might feel different if we were talking about anyone _else's_ pages.)

Best,
Charles

Hi Charles;

I didn't say thre were no major changes; just that I hadn't noticed any in two days of use. ;-)

Glad to hear that there are some significant improvements.

Charles

The OS X Odyssey archives may be accessed here:
http://www.applelinks.com/news/odyssey/

CM

Charles W. Moore