November 6th, 2003
The meeting was mostly discussing the new features of Panther.
Apple released Panther, and many people camped out in front of stores to buy it.
My experience was that I had to do a complete clean install, but if you are an average user, hopefully the upgrade method will work for you!
Most of what Panther does is bring back many of the features that mac lovers had in system 6-9 that disappeared with OS X because apple did not have the time to work on non critical features.
But to turn it on is not easy. Go to system preferences, International, click on the Input menu tab. Click on the Keyboard Viewer, and Character Palette.
You now have an american flag in the upper right hand corner! Click on it and select Keyboard Viewer and there is your old keycaps. Show character palette is nice for finding those special symbols too.
Right click on any icon in the finder and you can pick your color. To names of the colors, just go to Finder and Preferences, click on Labels, and you can change the names.
Hold down the apple key, and click on the name in the title bar, you will have a pop up list of all the folders to drill down to the one your looking at.
It was only in late system 9, but they now have it. Turn it on in the system preferences.
Actually this was in Jaguar, but still worth noting, drag a file to a folder and hold, it will open to let you pick another folder inside.
Appletalk is actually disabled by default, go to system preferences, Network, configure, and click on appletalk, then check the Make AppleTalk Active box.
Yes, now you can once again put a printer on the desktop. Go to system preferences, Print & Fax, Set up Printers, click on the printer you want, click on the Printers menu. Down at the bottom is Create Desktop Printer.
In the finder, under the Edit menu, there is a show clipboard option.
If you hold down option while closing a window, it will close all of the windows that are open.
Also Apple-Option-W will close all the windows.
Go to system preferences, keyboard and mouse, then click on Keyboard Shortcuts.
You can now browse computers from the darkside much easier, print to their printers, and even share printers with windows users! To share with windows users, go to system preferences, sharing, click on Windows Sharing, if you want to share your printer, check Printer Sharing.
hit F9 to see all the windows, F10 to see all the windows for only the front application, and F11 to make all the windows go away. Hit the same key again to bring them back.
While Safari worked quite well right out the gate, mail was lacking in features. Mail is now much better, having some of the features most people expect out of a mail client.
An obvious attempt at one more feature! But under the file menu in the finder, there is now a Secure empty trash that will completely delete your files, instead of just mostly deleting them.
To force quit the current program hit Apple-Option-Shift-ESC.
If you would like to switch between programs easy, hit Apple-Tab, to cycle backwards, hit Apple-Shift-Tab. If you hold down the Apple key, you can use the mouse to pick the application.
Also when you are selecting an application, type Q to quit, H to hide or M to minimize.
Go to sherlock, click on channels. In Other channels is a whole bunch of new channels that may not work quite right.
There is now a new application called Font Book in your application folder. It duplicates most of the functionality of Suitcase or other font programs, and it's free!
Does anyone use the calculator that is built in your applications folder? Well you have always been able to turn it scientific and add a paper tape under the view menu, but now under the convert menu, it will convert currency, area, volume, temperature, and a whole bunch of other things from one unit to another. It will even download current currency conversions.
The biggest change is the sidebar that pops up. You can now search through PDF's at the speed of light. Click on the button next to the search bar and you can see previews or headings. Also, you can make changes to pictures under the tools menu.
If you go to System Preferences, Desktop & Screen Saver, you can make the desktop pictures in your picture folder, and have them change every 10 seconds.
If the system accesses a file that is less than 20 megabytes and is fragmented too much, it will defragment it on the fly.
Apple-Shift-4 and then the spacebar will turn your cursor into a camera, and you can take a picture of any window on the screen. Apple-Shift-3 still takes a picture of the whole screen.
Safari, I-chat, and a whole bunch of other technical stuff is right there on the cd's. Like X-11 if you want to run some unix software, and Developer tools if you would like to write a program in C, Java, or applescript.
And even then I would still be wary, because if you lose your password, your files will be gone forever.
Gone, gone, and gone!