Let This Black Cat Cross Your Path
Tonight Apple lets its latest cat out of the bag.
From 8pm 'til midnight tonight, you can finally get your hands on Panther at an
Apple Store near you. I've been living with Panther for several months now, and
I can tell you that I've had a much easier time with this big cat than Roy did
with his. Still, this is quite a different animal from Jaguar, and so I hope it
might be helpful to list a few things I've learned about living with a
Panther.
First off, I'm happy to report that going from
Jaguar (10.1.x) to Panther (10.3) was a lot easier than going from Puma (10.0.x)
to Jaguar. That's doesn't mean that the differences between Jaguar and Panther
are insignificant. It means that Apple built the infrastructure into Jaguar to
better facilitate major system changes in the future, and that that effort paid
off. I should also qualify the above statement by letting you know that I've
been using Panther on some of Apple's latest hardware (a dual-processor G4 in
the office, and my personal 12" PoweBook G4). I've heard a number of reports
that doing an upgrade install of Panther on older hardware is problematic. The
best solution in these situations may be to perform a clean install. In some
situations, such as on a blue and white G3 containing a SCSI card, Panther may
be a very cranky kitty.
So what are all these major changes to which I'm referring? To start with, there's over 100 new features, which is why Apple feels that this upgrade is worth another $130. I can tell you from experience that a huge effort went into Jaguar and Panther, making it impossible under any sane business model for Apple to give these upgrades away for free. Whether the price is too steep is a matter of opinion that's open to debate. My own feeling is that for the amount of effort that went into the upgrade, and for the amount of new features and added value brought by the upgrade, $130 is a pretty reasonable price, particularly since it will be discounted by many retailers.
David Pogue has written a very good article that details a lot of the major and minor new features of Panther, and breaks down the cost of the upgrade in a sensible way, so I won't re-hash those here. One feature that Pogue discusses that I would like to touch on is the new FileVault Security feature.
This feature protects your entire home directory by converting it into an encrypted disk image. Ideally this feature should be transparent to you, and I think under most instances it will be. But you should be aware that because your home directory will be a disk image, and an encrypted one at that, you could see performance degradation; especially if you're using older hardware like a G3. Before you turn on this feature, be sure to make a back-up of your home directory. Ideally, you should back up all your data before doing the Panther installation, but if you don't, then at least back-up your home directory after installing Panther. This is very easy to do with the new Disk Utility application. Just launch Disk Utility, and then choose New>Image from Folder from the Images menu. Select your home directory in the choose folder dialog and then go grab a cup of coffee while Disk Utility images your home directory. Depending on the size of your home directory, you can then use Disk Utility to burn the image to a CD or DVD. Another easy backup option for DotMac members is to download Apple's free (for members) Backup application. Backup will burn your home directory to a series of CD's or DVD's, prompting you to insert new blank discs when needed. You could probably also use the new Create Archive command in the Finder, but I haven't played with this feature so you're on your own if you decide to use it.
Quite franky though, I would use the FileVault feature only if you're really in need of a very secure home directory. If you're not using your Mac in a constantly networked environment, and particularly if you don't have File Sharing, SSH, FTP, Remote AppleEvents, and/or Personal Web Sharing active without a fire wall, then I think you're probably okay without using FileVault. I personally am approaching this feature like buying the first year of a new car model -- you just don't do it. You wait for the next release of the model, when all the early adopters have worked out the kinks for the manufacturer.
Another area of potential "gotchas" in Panther is for users of AppleScript in the Finder. The Finder has essentially been completely re-written in Panther. This is really good news from a performance and feature standpoint. And the Finder team did a really outstanding job of making the new Finder backwardly compatible with older services and applications that rely on it, like AppleScript. But it's not the same Finder, and there are certain situations in which Panther's Finder may gack on your AppleScripts. The Finder has always been sort of a strange beast to script. In the past, scripters could be fairly lax about the data types they could pass to the Finder and most of the time it would just work. For instance, they could in certain circumstances pass paths to the Finder as either aliases and even text strings, and the Finder would understand. The Panther Finder is much stricter about path types, and all paths should be classed as file. Here's an example: under Jaguar the following code worked,
But under Panther, the above code fails. Here's the changed code that works:
To make the code work in Panther, I simply removed the parentheses and coerced the string "my_path" to a file class.
Another aspect of the Finder that may surprise you is that the Add to Favorites command has been removed. It has been replaced by the Add to Sidebar command, which is now the preferred method of taking a shortcut to another part of the file system. The "sidebar" is new to Finder windows and operates sort of like the playlist pane in iTunes, or the photo album pane in iPhoto. You can drag files and folders into the sidebar, and they're always available in Finder windows as well as open/save dialogs. The problem is that, if you're like me, then you probably have a lot of favorites that would make the sidebar a pretty cluttered little pane if you added them all there. The solution for me was to add my Favorites folder itself (~/Library/Favorites, where ~ is your home directory), to the sidebar. This makes it easy to add new aliases to the Favorites folder by Option-dragging icons into it in the sidebar. But what about the old Command-T keyboard shortcut you wonder? It's still there, but now it adds aliases to the sidebar. If you want to add aliases to Favorites with the keyboard shortcut in Panther, then you'll have to get used to using Command-Shift-T.
Another area of potential conflict in Panther is if you're using third party shareware products that incorporate "haxies." These include add-on's and applications like Fruit Menu, Xounds, Detour, and Audio Hijack. In most cases everything will work fine, because Apple kept the mechanism that make haxies possible in Panther for compatibility's sake. But you may run into some applications that crash under Panther when haxies are installed.
To understand why this happens, you must first understand how haxies work. They're viral in nature. A haxie is a chunk of code that attaches to a running application's memory space and spawns a new thread which then intercepts certain events to the application and thus is able to change an application's appearance and/or behavior. This why haxies are able to add UI features that aren't built into the OS. This worked pretty well in Jaguar, but in Panther, the kernel extension architecture was changed pretty dramatically, and this includes the way in which application services access kernel services. As a result of these changes, some applications my react violenty (i.e, crash), when a haxie attempts to attach to the application and spawn a new thread.
Technically, haxies are a pretty huge security violation. If any viruses or worms emerge on OS X, I won't be at all surprised if they're in the form of haxies. It's a very clever mechanism, but also very dangerous. This is why I wouldn't count on haxies continuing to work on OS X into the foreseeable future. If you're a heavy user of haxies, or a developer of haxie-based applications, it would be best to start weening yourself off haxies and onto some other mechanism now.
So there you have it. Just a few random tips that occurred to me on this afternoon before the night of the Panther. I hope you enjoy the new version with all of its new features. Everyone at Apple has worked really, really hard on it.
So what are all these major changes to which I'm referring? To start with, there's over 100 new features, which is why Apple feels that this upgrade is worth another $130. I can tell you from experience that a huge effort went into Jaguar and Panther, making it impossible under any sane business model for Apple to give these upgrades away for free. Whether the price is too steep is a matter of opinion that's open to debate. My own feeling is that for the amount of effort that went into the upgrade, and for the amount of new features and added value brought by the upgrade, $130 is a pretty reasonable price, particularly since it will be discounted by many retailers.
David Pogue has written a very good article that details a lot of the major and minor new features of Panther, and breaks down the cost of the upgrade in a sensible way, so I won't re-hash those here. One feature that Pogue discusses that I would like to touch on is the new FileVault Security feature.
This feature protects your entire home directory by converting it into an encrypted disk image. Ideally this feature should be transparent to you, and I think under most instances it will be. But you should be aware that because your home directory will be a disk image, and an encrypted one at that, you could see performance degradation; especially if you're using older hardware like a G3. Before you turn on this feature, be sure to make a back-up of your home directory. Ideally, you should back up all your data before doing the Panther installation, but if you don't, then at least back-up your home directory after installing Panther. This is very easy to do with the new Disk Utility application. Just launch Disk Utility, and then choose New>Image from Folder from the Images menu. Select your home directory in the choose folder dialog and then go grab a cup of coffee while Disk Utility images your home directory. Depending on the size of your home directory, you can then use Disk Utility to burn the image to a CD or DVD. Another easy backup option for DotMac members is to download Apple's free (for members) Backup application. Backup will burn your home directory to a series of CD's or DVD's, prompting you to insert new blank discs when needed. You could probably also use the new Create Archive command in the Finder, but I haven't played with this feature so you're on your own if you decide to use it.
Quite franky though, I would use the FileVault feature only if you're really in need of a very secure home directory. If you're not using your Mac in a constantly networked environment, and particularly if you don't have File Sharing, SSH, FTP, Remote AppleEvents, and/or Personal Web Sharing active without a fire wall, then I think you're probably okay without using FileVault. I personally am approaching this feature like buying the first year of a new car model -- you just don't do it. You wait for the next release of the model, when all the early adopters have worked out the kinks for the manufacturer.
Another area of potential "gotchas" in Panther is for users of AppleScript in the Finder. The Finder has essentially been completely re-written in Panther. This is really good news from a performance and feature standpoint. And the Finder team did a really outstanding job of making the new Finder backwardly compatible with older services and applications that rely on it, like AppleScript. But it's not the same Finder, and there are certain situations in which Panther's Finder may gack on your AppleScripts. The Finder has always been sort of a strange beast to script. In the past, scripters could be fairly lax about the data types they could pass to the Finder and most of the time it would just work. For instance, they could in certain circumstances pass paths to the Finder as either aliases and even text strings, and the Finder would understand. The Panther Finder is much stricter about path types, and all paths should be classed as file. Here's an example: under Jaguar the following code worked,
set my_path to "HD:Users:Shared:home_backup.dmg"
tell application "Finder"if (my_path exists) thenmove my_path to trashend ifend tell
But under Panther, the above code fails. Here's the changed code that works:
set my_path to "HD:Users:Shared:home_backup.dmg"
tell application "Finder"if file my_path exists thenmove my_path to trashend ifend tell
To make the code work in Panther, I simply removed the parentheses and coerced the string "my_path" to a file class.
Another aspect of the Finder that may surprise you is that the Add to Favorites command has been removed. It has been replaced by the Add to Sidebar command, which is now the preferred method of taking a shortcut to another part of the file system. The "sidebar" is new to Finder windows and operates sort of like the playlist pane in iTunes, or the photo album pane in iPhoto. You can drag files and folders into the sidebar, and they're always available in Finder windows as well as open/save dialogs. The problem is that, if you're like me, then you probably have a lot of favorites that would make the sidebar a pretty cluttered little pane if you added them all there. The solution for me was to add my Favorites folder itself (~/Library/Favorites, where ~ is your home directory), to the sidebar. This makes it easy to add new aliases to the Favorites folder by Option-dragging icons into it in the sidebar. But what about the old Command-T keyboard shortcut you wonder? It's still there, but now it adds aliases to the sidebar. If you want to add aliases to Favorites with the keyboard shortcut in Panther, then you'll have to get used to using Command-Shift-T.
Another area of potential conflict in Panther is if you're using third party shareware products that incorporate "haxies." These include add-on's and applications like Fruit Menu, Xounds, Detour, and Audio Hijack. In most cases everything will work fine, because Apple kept the mechanism that make haxies possible in Panther for compatibility's sake. But you may run into some applications that crash under Panther when haxies are installed.
To understand why this happens, you must first understand how haxies work. They're viral in nature. A haxie is a chunk of code that attaches to a running application's memory space and spawns a new thread which then intercepts certain events to the application and thus is able to change an application's appearance and/or behavior. This why haxies are able to add UI features that aren't built into the OS. This worked pretty well in Jaguar, but in Panther, the kernel extension architecture was changed pretty dramatically, and this includes the way in which application services access kernel services. As a result of these changes, some applications my react violenty (i.e, crash), when a haxie attempts to attach to the application and spawn a new thread.
Technically, haxies are a pretty huge security violation. If any viruses or worms emerge on OS X, I won't be at all surprised if they're in the form of haxies. It's a very clever mechanism, but also very dangerous. This is why I wouldn't count on haxies continuing to work on OS X into the foreseeable future. If you're a heavy user of haxies, or a developer of haxie-based applications, it would be best to start weening yourself off haxies and onto some other mechanism now.
So there you have it. Just a few random tips that occurred to me on this afternoon before the night of the Panther. I hope you enjoy the new version with all of its new features. Everyone at Apple has worked really, really hard on it.
Posted: Fri - October 24, 2003 at 09:50 AM
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