[Ti] Panther FireWire debacle

[Benn]

On Oct 31, 2003, at 2:26 PM, Steve Wozniak wrote:
> At 12:36 PM -0500 2003.10.31, Henry Kalir wrote:
>> Think about it...how many hours have we lost dealing with stuff like
>> this?? Whatever happened to the old plug and play of yore?
>
> All I can say is that I lost a lot of time due to Panther.
>
> I was astounded that in a few days of doing nothing unusual I was 
> messed up by so many things, that had become a part of my habits, 
> changing. This is not user friendly. Some buttons that were defaults 
> before no longer were. Icons shifted all over. I never could get my 
> sticky notes to open at the top of my screen, where I kept some of 
> them. I was off email for a few days because my Eudora could not send 
> with Panther. It took me that long to find time to transfer my Eudora 
> folder to another machine running Jaguar, which is where I am now. I 
> printed over and over to multiple printers and lost all of it, 
> eventually deleting my printers and re-creating them. This is not 
> plug-n-play and is not user friendly. My mother would never have found 
> any solutions to these things.
>
> The only thing I liked was the command-tab app switching (MacOS was 
> better than the dock for this, in my opinion). But I was disappointed 
> to hear that this good things was copied off of Windows. I do remember 
> it being a part of Office once, and was a favorite method of mine back 
> then.
>
> I can't add a lot because I never tried to run any apps, other than 
> iChat (maybe) and Eudora and a couple of others with Panther. IE was 
> crashing a lot but at least I finally found how to get my bookmarks to 
> Safari (by using Tinker Tool) on my retreat to Jaguar. I won't mention 
> how many of my sites have failed me with Safari so far.
>
> Today at a ribbon cutting for a Carnegie Mellon campus it was asked 
> how many think software works. Not a hand went up.

You know, to be honest, I share some of the same feelings.
I upgraded to panther and things seemed almost more foreign than when I 
switched to X in the first place...
First off, I really don't like the new finder...I had no problems with 
the old one.  First, the metal interface.  Now, I never minded metal in 
iTunes, iMovie or most any other apps (with the exception of 
quicktime--doing a "full screen" (I mean cmd-3, not the actual full 
screen mode) always made mad by how much the outline took up).  
However, the new finder takes up way too much space and limits me on 
the efficient way I've learned to use it.  I'd love to use the aqua 
interface, but there's my second problem.  I rely on the toolbar a lot. 
  Lots of drag and drop apps there, as well as aliases to folder.  It's 
so more efficient in the way I use the finder windows than throwing 
everything in the sidebar.  Speaking of the toolbar, you used to be 
able to spring load folder from it, but not anymore.  And perhaps the 
greatest interference for me is the limited ability to scroll up a 
hierarchy when you used an aliased folder (home, applications, etc) 
without using cmd-up or cmd-clicking the toolbar.  It doesn't make 
sense to me to take that functionality out.  The only thing I got out 
of the new finder: it spring loads folders in the window you spring 
load from.  Always wanted that.
As for the cmd-tab for app switching, I'm not a fan of the new method.  
I really like the dock, and I thought that app switching from it wasn't 
bad.  Similarly, expose doesn't do a whole lot for me (it'd be a 
blessing on a 12" powerbook, but not so much on my 17"), as I still 
tend to do my app switching from the dock or clicking on the windows I 
want.  No need to add another step.

The speed increase is pretty nice, even on my Powerbook.  Apps launch 
faster and finder navigation is very quick.  Overall, though, I'm not 
terribly impressed with 10.3.

Benn