New Panther Builds Yield Speed, User Experience Improvements

The latest distribution, dubbed Panther 7B21, was frozen last week and was briefly distributed to developers over Panther's Software Update module. Soon after, the release was made available via a 3 CD image set on Apple's Developer Connection servers. Coupled with the 7A202 build released a few weeks earlier, the two seedings provide a number of speed and user experience enhancements over what was already made public in June.

For starters, Panther's version of Quartz engine is said to be almost 40 percent faster than Jaguar's on desktop machines, and one trusted AppleInsider source commenting on speed improvements said the recent updates to Panther "made my 600MHz iBook feel like a new machine!"

Included in the latest seed of Panther is Safari 1.1 (v89). Originally released in June, version 1.0 of Safari was rushed to golden master status after Microsoft announced the discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Mac. While the initial release of Safari was fast, sleek, and intuitive, it has been widely criticized for being marred with caching issues and inconsistencies among web standards. Version 1.1 will address these issues and will include other browsing enhancements such as progressive image loading.

Aside from supporting on screen notification of Bluetooth keyboards and mice, Panther now sports Airport notification in the same fashion. When a client machine comes in range of an wireless signal, an AirPort connect image will fade in and then out of the screen. The same behavior, via a disconnect image, will take place when exiting the range of a wireless signal.

Taking lessons from Proteron Software, Panther's built in application switcher now boast similar functionality to LiteSwitch X. This includes on-screen icon display of actively running applications. Additionally, user's can also quit applications from the enhanced switcher.

Speaking of third party software, the fate of Aladdin System's StuffIt suite may be up in the air with Apple's embodiment of Zip compression functionality built directly into the Finder's contextual menu system. Other slick improvements to the Finder's user experience include a zoom-fade effect of application and document icons when they are launched from within the finder. [see clip].

Finally, AppleInsider sources applaud Apple's efforts to begin warning user's when their hard disk is about to exceed the capacity at which it can run safely. Extremely active user's of Jaguar will note that when their startup disk reach less than 250MB of free disk space, system preferences begin to be lost and the machine can often come to a churning halt. A new dialog box will now warn user's prior to this occurrence.