Panther first impressions

I just installed Mac OS 10.3 (Panther), and of course installed 10.3.1 as well. The installation went without serious incident, except that some things are still a bit unsettled (though less unsettled than I expected); the Wacom tablet isn't reinstalled and also X11 stuff is all messed up (I haven't figured out how to get Apple X11 to work yet, and OroborOSX has obviously been hosed; also I think I need to install Xcode and get all my Fink stuff up to speed).

Exposé is cool enough, but for my money I think the single best change is the subtle improvement in font rendering. They're now doing some hinting on horizontal strokes, which cuts down the blur considerably at the cost of a tiny distortion in font shapes. John Gruber (no, not that other guy) explains what that means here, in an article that is an excellent update to my 10.1-era MacEdition article on the subject. He's also right about the brilliance of John Siracusa's ArsTechnica review.

Also, the new Activity Monitor and the rewritten Console are pretty awesome. I once tried installing large chunks of GNOME in an unsuccessful bid to get a decent process viewer on this system. Now there's one that ships with the OS.

fonts of all nations

I don't think this OS came with the Canadian aboriginal syllabics before.

ᐬᔒᙜᙴᑋᐾᑎᒈᐨᒗᒭᑼ

Okay, that was undoubtedly unpronounceable gibberish in Inuktitut.

Also, these ᏘᎶᏪᏝᏯᏨᎹ are some Cherokee syllables. If you installed all the fonts for Panther you can see them too.

Kanji and bopomofo are old hat.

Okay, this is beyond remarkable into the strange

Installed Unicode fonts also include Deseret. �������� ������.

...Strange, that works in Camino but not in Safari.

X11

Okay, Apple X11 actually is working. In many ways, though, it's inferior to OroborOSX, as chicken_cem said. The smooth fonts are nice, I guess, but there's nothing like the Helper Scripts, as far as I can tell. The Helper Scripts are boss. I guess I'll have to hack up some AppleScript/Bourne shell loogies again so I can open files with Unix apps. I did hear that Mr. Umpleby is working on a new OroborOSX version that lives in the new world.

OroborOSX

Apparently OroborOSX does work with Panther but you have to do some stuff. I'll try it tomorrow.

eat the dogfood

So they're telling me to stick to the binaries for a while, and they tell me to run "fink selfupdate", but "fink selfupdate" itself does not download binaries but compiles a million things from source. Whatever you say, guys. I'm just watching the happy compilations scroll up the screen.

Opening X11 apps the Mac way

I have tired of trying to make OroborOSX work in Panther for the moment. I think I'll wait for Adrian's next revision. I'll admit that Apple X11 does have its advantages; for instance, it launches faster and has better performance in general. But there are no Helper Scripts.

So it's back to Plan A, which I will now tell you.

( scary geek stuff )