Comments on: Panther Notes

By: Malic

Malic — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 21:35:24 +0000

Panther is slick on my Summer of 2000 iMac DV – 500Mhz/1G RAM – I got about %5+ overall increase on performance according to XBench.
But I do agree about the Aqua/Brushed metal thing. Someone in Apple has more say than they should in such things. The brushed metal look of the iLife apps is…ok, I suppose. But the Finder shouldn’t have gotten the treatment.
The one thing STILL not dealt with is the “iSub not waking from sleep consistently” problem!!! I don’t care if they discontinue the thing (why?!), this should be fixed!!!

By: eric

eric — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 19:14:33 +0000

On this site, at least, paragraphs are justified – messing with the whitespace of Verdana; maybe this is what you’re seeing? I personally haven’t seen any variations between my PC and my iBook.

By: John W

John W — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 16:53:10 +0000

[re: ugly Lucida, ugly Verdana, bad anti-aliasing]
I too have left comments on other sites regarding Lucida Grande.
It is noticeably thinner. And yes, there a higher amount of anti-aliasing systemwide. To my eyes, it’s downright blurry and unacceptable. What’s more, the character spacing for Verdana seems to have changed. All you “11px verdana” style-ers watch out– you’re going to see huge rivers of whitespace open up in your content. It’s not pretty at all.
I’m still using a CRT (call me a dinosaur), but it’s a high-end Sony with one of the finest dot pitches available. Maybe Panther is optimized for viewing on an LCD? I hope not.
What I know is this: Aqua wasn’t a bad idea. But those who complained of “a death of a 1000 cuts” are going to start winning over more sympathizers. Brushed metal, drop shadows, glassy buttons, anti-aliasing to the hilt… I dunno– it was all starting to look a little “shlocky-but-acceptable” to me, but with all these additional annoyances, I’m beginning to wonder whether or not the whole look and feel of the OS is heading for the crapper. Let’s just hope they introduce animated paper clips and doggies n 10.4!

By: Andre Leistner

Andre Leistner — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 09:14:42 +0000

[skinny Lucida Grande in Panther]
I don’t think that Apple has changed Lucida Grande’s font metrics – this would probably have too much impact on text placement in application dialogs etc. To me it rather looks that they’ve modified the font rendering and anti-aliasing in order to improve readability on screen. Take a look at other fonts such as Times, especially at small sizes.

By: steven

steven — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 23:28:39 +0000

also notice that the flash and shockwave performance within Safari 1.1 took a noticeable downturn for the worse. They had improved performance recently to the acceptable level, but now it is back below some of the early Safari beta levels. Poor.

By: Rik Abel

Rik Abel — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 12:02:14 +0000

Exposé is even yet still greater with a five-button mouse, as mentioned already. MASSIVE productivity aid- I don’t just keep tiling the windows gratuitously because it is so cool. I would never do that.

By: Matt

Matt — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 04:09:43 +0000

Didn’t 10.2 and lower had shadows on Lucida? I could be mistaken.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 00:25:57 +0000

Yes, I absolutely think it’s weird to change the metrics of a font without calling it by a separate name (like, as you mention, Lucida Narrow). I’ve read a few posts on other boards today saying this issue might actually be related to the use of Extensis Suitcase under Panther. I do use Suitcase but have been too lazy to disable it and see if things go back to normal. Just another thing to think about.

By: Bruno

Bruno — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 23:54:38 +0000

Fontbook has some problems.
I had a problem that simple crashed the launching of other system applications. Reinstall panther and again, when messing with font activation in fontbook, serious problems. I discovered that the problem was related with a file (com.apple.AST.plist) in the Preferences folder that got corrupted somehow … this file seems to have the information about active and desactive fonts managed by Fontbook.
To solve the problem I deleted the file and logged again. Problem solved… but i cannot trust Fontbook!

By: Emyr

Emyr — Tue, 04 Nov 2003 21:37:13 +0000

Re: enabling personal web pages with FileVault active Try this hint from Mac OS X Hints.