12/11/03
9G5 and Panther
My transition to a G5 and then finally Panther has gone easier than I expected. Everytime I upgrade I always cross my fingers and hope that everything will still work. More often than not a few applications can longer work under their environment.
First I discovered that my Apple pro speakers will not work with G5’s as they have a unique connector. You have to shell out £30 for a Griffin iFire adaptor, almost as much as the speakers cost in the first place. It ain’t cheap, but its still cheaper than buying new USB speakers, and the internal speaker in the G5 is tinny to say the least. Other than that, no problems.
Last weekend my upgrade to Panther finally arrived, and it absolutely flies. I’m not sure if its optimised for G5’s, but there is a definite speed increase from Jaguar. For the first time since OS 9, everything feels snappy and responsive. It finally feels faster than my PC. The toned-down pinstripe is much easier on the eye. Although I’m a fan of brushed metal apps like Safari, I find it quite odd in the finder, but I’m getting used to it.
Extensis Suitcase 10 was the only application that wouldn’t work. As I do print design, I wouldn’t consider using FontBook yet. Suitcase will not only auto-activate fonts when opening documents in InDesign, and Illustrator, but it provides a ‘bridge extension’ making the fonts simultaneously active to all classic apps too (in my case Quark 5 is the my only reason for using classic – but its a big one). To get Suitcase to work, I discovered that had all I had to do was dump my previous font database, and re-import all my fonts.
Expose is genius. If you use Clutter to play your iTunes library, you can place all the CD coves on top of each other, and then reveal them all with expose. The only niggle is that it doesn’t show any windows that you’ve hidden. My other favourite addition is fast user switching. Its more than just a flying Borg cube effect – you can set up different accounts for a variety of situations – web development, print design etc. and flick between them quickly.
In short, Panther is the the best upgrade I’ve seen in a long time.
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Dris said 1743 days ago:
Having the opposite problem with speakers... I noticed that the speaker plug on my iMac was too small for normal jacks, and I wanted to plug my Jensons in through my amplifier. In the end, I just opted to plug into the headphone plug instead. Oh well.Panther is indeed a great update! I LOVE Expose... That's a clever idea for multi-purpose users... I probably won't use it myself (I prefer a universal environment), but a great idea nonetheless!
Arthur J. Bahadourian said 1743 days ago:
Hello,Q: Is it OK to update Panther over Jaguar? ...or to install on a clean/new drive?
P.S. -- ...just like you [Jon] I work in both web and print environments.
Scrivs said 1743 days ago:
I like Panther on my 12" PB. Since I never owned a Mac before this I can't say whether it is faster than Jag or not, but it definitely is not slow, and this is with only 256mb RAM.Jon HIcks said 1743 days ago:
Arthur,Yes you can install Panther over Jaguar - thats what I did. When you run the installer CD it discovers that you've already got a version of OS X installed and allows you to upgrade.
While it keeps all your files and settings, its probably safer to do a backup before you upgrade - just in case. I haven't had any problems with print design apps - apart from the suitcase problem mentioned above.
Jon HIcks said 1743 days ago:
Scrivs - so you went for a PB in the end! Glad to hear it!Egor Kloos said 1742 days ago:
I'm looking to upgrade soon. Holding off till my new harddisk arrives. Then I'll do a clean install. My present install is starting to get a bit funky.Arthur J. Bahadourian said 1742 days ago:
Thankx Jon,...everything went smoothly, except I can launch Safari 1.1, it unexpectedly quits. Maybe both 1.0 and 1.1 can't coexist together. Since I upgraded from Jaguar, Safari 1.0 was already my default browser. I'll follow-up with my result...
Arthur J. Bahadourian said 1742 days ago:
Got resolved! I found the following at Apple's site -- http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107792Jon HIcks said 1742 days ago:
Glad you got it sorted? Strange, your copy of 1.0 should've been overwritten by 1.1.Egor - I did a clean install a few months ago when I was using Jaguar and while it didn't make any difference to the performance, I did reclaim about 1gb of HD space.