Obligatory monthly Mac-oriented post

Monday, November 10, 2003 » link update

Ars Technica has up an extremely thorough review of Mac OS X 10.3, aka Panther. Now, being extremely thorough works both ways. On the plus side, it does seem to cover every imaginable aspect of the upgrade in great detail. Several times I was amused by the author's nitpicking of things like the contextual menu interface for file labels, and of course how there's still no way to change the Finder's icon grid size. However, the author tends to digress quite often into stuff like the psychology behind spatial window management and the persistence of folder appearances (presumably to praise and condemn Apple's design decisions, respectively). By the time he's done, the full article is about seventy (70) pages long (with images). So, it's not exactly a light read, but it's probably the best impression of the Panther experience you can get without somehow injecting yourself with a straight month of hands-on use.

Although there's even a section about it in the review, Ars also covers Safari in their Mac browser smackdown. It's a pretty detailed comparison, although it didn't tell me much that I didn't already know. Here is a highlight (which will be appreciated for browser enthusiasts and no one else):

Let's take a look at Frankenbrowser 1.0, the hypothetical speedy and standards-compliant browser that doesn't yet exist. It would feature

• Mozilla's standards compliance
• OmniWeb's user interface and appearance
• Safari's bookmark bar, tab implementation, and integration with .Mac
• Camino's speed
• Opera's control over preferences
• Internet Explorer's market share