As promised, I've just prepared a detailed review of Panther build that has been given to developers during WWDC 2003 (build 7A179). I'll try to cover not only the features that Steve Jobs mentioned but some that he did not.

Let's start with the new Finder that surprised some readers who also reacted negatively. I'd like to reassure them about the fact that the customizable tool bar is still here and that we can even hide the new side bar. We can also still use it as the Mac OS 9 finder with new windows opening for every folder.

I think "Exposé" will be the most useful new feature of Panther, this was really missing from Mac OS X, to be able to manage open applications and windows. You can activate "Exposé" either with function keys or with hot corners that are set on a dedicated preferences pane. Now I see why there was nothing for windows management in earlier and current versions of Mac OS X, they just wanted it to be perfect. Actually "Exposé" combined with the Dock are the best way I've seen to manage your open applications.

I was quite shocked by the fact that Disk Copy application has disappeared from the Utilities folder, I don't know where it has gone, but I found a lot of its features in the Disk Utility which now has a tab and a menu dedicated to image files.

Now what about the Address Book (3.1 - v257)? Actually there are not only edition features as I had predicted, there are also other cool features: if you wanted Address Book to have more specialised fields than it already had, you'll love the the template editing feature. It allows you to edit the cards template and add or remove any field you want, then this template will apply for all the new contacts you add.

TextEdit (1.3 - v578) has also been a lot improved. The most interesting new features are page wrap which allows you to make multi-page documents and Word (.doc) documents transparent compatibility. Yes you read right, TextEdit, opens and saves .doc documents without even any conversion. It is however quite limited when it comes to documents containing tables for example.

There is also something a few testers have noticed, Apple has not only included X11 1.0 in Panther but also a sort of Fink-like program. It allows you to find ready to install applications or to compile packages for X11 on your Mac with just one click. It looks like the package list's server is not up yet so you can't install any package at the moment. It is even better than Fink actually because the software packages are organized in categories. As for X11 itself, it has also been improved with the, I guess, very requested full screen feature which is even better than on the XDarwin port because it doesn't require to restart X11 environment to toggle between full screen and rootless mode.

The system preferences have been re-organized quite a bit, with Desktop and Screen Effects merged into one pane, and a lot of cool features have been added. For example in the Sharing pane, we can notice that the Apple Remote Desktop client (call it server if you want) is already installed and that for the Internet sharing feature, we can now choose the interface from which we want to share our Internet connection. It will be useful for those who have multiple kinds of Internet connections on the same computer.

A new Print and Fax pane has also appeared in Panther. It allows you to set the defaults for printing and brings the Fax feature in Mac OS X. Notice that if you use the wake-up on modem ring detect feature in the Energy settings, you can receive faxes without having to leave your computer "awake" while you're out.

The Network pane has also seen significant changes as well as new features. One of the most important is the support for VPN (PPPTP) and IPv6 network connections. I think this was a really needed feature. Users had to use third party software to do that until now, so it is really good news.

There are also some expert settings for the Ethernet controller like MTU size, duplex, speed. All that gives an idea of the improvements we may see in the new Administration applications of Panther Server.

The system is overall faster than Jaguar with faster application launches, more reactive menus and Finder. Last year, Jaguar's speed improvement was more noticable than Panther's one though. I can't say this build is very stable, I noticed some big bugs in Exposé, the Finder's fast search feature and X11 (especially with the full screen mode). There is also another problem, it simply never wanted to boot on a PowerMac G4 350AGP upgraded with a 1Ghz/2Mb DDR GigaDesigns card. I don't think the problem is coming from the processor upgrade because one of my sources tryed it with the same upgrade on an AGP PowerMac and it worked fine Let's hope this problem will be fixed on newer builds.

As you see this is only the part 1 of my Panther 7A179 detailed report, there will certainly be a second part in which I'm going to detail the new features and improvements of SMB, printing, Mail, iChat AV, QuickTime, Font Book, security, multi-user, utilities, xCode, Preview as well as general changes in Panther 7A179 that may haven't even been noticed by some who have the chance to run the build on their Mac. Don't hesitate to send me mails with your questions here.