Now that a good bit of the Mac population has Panther, I thought it would be a good time to go over what I like most about the new OS. If you have a differing opinion, let me know.
TextEdit
Apple didn’t make a new ad campaign centered around TextEdit, but they could have. This little, “application that could”, can now read and write .docs! It also sports cool things like styles. This makes my rare grab for Word, a lot more rare.
Preview
Another one of those little upgrades. Preview can now crop, which is really handy when you just need a quick change and don’t want to fire up Photoshop. It also sports a search function for PDFs. Both very cool. Not really Preview, but the sheer speed of PDF rendering in Panther is great
Application switcher
Yes, I know it wasn’t original, but I like it. Quite handy.
Activity monitor
Again, one of these quite updates. One of the things that bugged me about X was that you could never really tell how much RAM applications were taking up without some weird Terminal tricks or freeware. Is it some sort of secret? Come on Apple.
With the new activity monitor (changed from process viewer), you can not only see RAM usage, but CPU, disk and network usage as well. It really kicks butt, and has some neat graphs that make it look like you’re doing a lot of work when your boss comes in for the 4th time in an hour.
Jon Gales is a PHP consultant and internet publisher. He writes
Macintosh slanted content for both MacMerc.com and MacDesignOnline.com.
Jon publishes both MobileTracker.net and NewsIsCrappy.com.
