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The window decor has changed for Panther. Instead of the grey and white stripes on the title, each window now sports a light grey grad fill. It's a bit of a return towards the creeping grey that eventually made OS 9 look so ugly, but for now it's OK. The gem buttons - close, minimise, etc - are now also set back into the title bar instead of sitting on it. Again, I think I prefered the old version, but it's not big thing.

What I do like is that they've chucked Sendmail out of the window and installed Postfix instead. Woo hoo for a mail server that doesn't have to run as root!

Journalling is now enabled by default on HFS+ it seems. It can be disabled with the new disk utility.

Also SMB name resolution seems to work as well. I just asked Mart to connect to my machine and he was able to connect to \\Margaret rather than my IP. I didn't just appear in his Network Neighbourhood though, but then neither do most of the Windows machines :-)

Here is a much better list of new stuff.

Installed Panther today. It's a bit of an anti-climax. Apple claim 150 features. It depends on what you would categorise as a feature really. I couldn't point to 150 things around the OS and say, "hey, check this out, it's the coolest!" In fact, there's only really Exposé that's worthy of that. Now there's a feature. I'm going to have to see how it fits into my daily life really. And there we have it IMHO. Panther is not a wow OS, it's an evolution that is going to make my working life much easier. When it comes to things that are going to save me time, the list looks better:

• Exposé first of all, I mention it twice. It has three modes though and they're all cool.
• Better file dialogs system-wide.
• Save as dialogs allow you to click an old file to overwrite! Finally! I've been waiting for this all along, it's going to take a while before I remember I can do it.
• Maximum mouse speed is much higher! Hooray!
• Junk mail filtering is better in the new version of Mail. Only a little bit. But then only a little bit of my junk got through the old system.
• Preview is faster than Acrobat Reader now and does haven't have Reader's long load time.
• Much much faster interface all round. Windows are snappier, scrolling is faster, GUI mouse operations feel like less effort.

The new Finder I'm not sure about. It doesn't really fit the way I use either Finder or hierarchical systems like Explorer or GMC etc. With Finder, I traditionally have a window for each folder, I know where those windows go and everything has it's place. With Explorer I have one window with which to view everything. That window stays where I put it and that makes me happy. With the new Finder I can kind of have one window, but if I double click a desktop folder ot connect to a server, a new window opens and it's the wrong place and it's the wrong size. This sounds pretty anal, but that's the way I use my file navigator.

The new mode of operation for connecting to CIFS/AFS shares looks pretty good, but I don't really connect to network machines that much.

Other than that, there's not a lot to report really. I get the feeling that I may well dig out more stuff over the next few days as I get back to work.

Panther's copy of Mail has a bug where junk email is recognised but not moved to the Junk folder, even when automatic mode is selected, if no other rules are present (i.e. non-junk rules). A workaround is to create a dummy rule. Mine says something like:

if from is equal to "vdssb 1 3208222vb3vb33097"
and from does not equal "vdssb 1 3208222vb3vb33097"
set the text colour to red

Silly, but effective.

Thanks to "Jon" who posted this workaround on Jim Bassett's weblog.

Just got back from NotCon, could have blogged while I was there, but was busy on the IRC chan - irc://irc.freenode.net/notcon (log). I really enjoyed the day, the highlight for me was the group. I really liked being hooked up to a busy network and chatting to people on IRC in the background. Tom Coates of plasticbag.org (who I met at the blogmeet a few weeks ago) had SubEthaEdit running and was using it to take notes. All the Panther users contributed, including me. The final file is a treasure trove, especially as I missed the first couple of hours. It was just great editing the file and contributing and it was much slicker than a wiki.

The talks were pretty good, the political stuff downstairs was the most interesting IMHO. The techie stuff was a bit obvious really. I would link to everything, but all the URLs are on the NotCon pages. The best stuff was Tim Ireland's MPs and Weblogs and, of course, Alex McLean (of Dorkbot) and his live hardcore coding.

Phew, bit tired now. Might blog more when more awake.

Last updated at 0:35, Monday December 1st, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are GMT.

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