Before starting with Panther I'd like to tell you about a new well-hidden feature of iChat AV. Those who have friends that run ICQ only will be happy to learn that they can now add them to their iChat list by typing their ICQ number on the AIM field of Address Book. Please note that to make this feature work, your friend has to use the latest alpha release of ICQ Lite or the latest ICQ for Mac that was recently released. This is a feature I had expected back in November 2002 in one of my postings, I'm happy that it came true.

I'm going to start with the utilities because I did not mention them a lot in my first review:

- The Activity Monitor is one of the most updated utilities with very useful new features. You can now know the usage of your processor, disk, RAM and network bandwidth for every application and you can make searches or see only items related to a selected user, for example.

- The Console has also been updated. We can now browse and see several types of logs and it is possible to send a report to Mail. This last feature has also been added to the activity monitor.

- On my last posting, I wasn't very precise about Ports Manager which is an X11 package installer like Fink. It gets sources from the Internet, organizes them into categories and then you just have to select a package and click to install. The first time I tried it, it would not work because it actually needs xCode to be installed to initialize itself properly. So, probably it didn't work without xCode because Apple has not yet updated the C libraries included in standard Panther installation. Anyway, at the moment even with xCode, it doesn't work very well. Actually it looks like Apple used DarwinPorts to make Ports Manager but I could not confirm that. Recently Fink, Gentoo and DarwinPorts merged and became Metapkg.

- Apple System Profiler interface has been re-organized with categories a lot like other Panther utilities.

- This is also the case with Internet Connect which reflects the new networking features I mentioned in my last posting.

- The Font Book is a new fonts management utility (though it's in the Applications folder), that will be really useful for professionals who have a lot of fonts or projects that need specific fonts. I don't think it supports all font formats though.

- I'm quite disappointed with what happened to Disk Burning on this early build of Panther. As I said in the first review. Disk Copy application has disappeared and Disk Utility has been improved and can now manage and burn disk images. The fact is that there is no new disk burning feature: still no ISO 9996 support (only MS-DOS), still no multi-session and it is still as painful as before to create a CD or DVD in Panther and burn it. Remember in a posting predicting what new features Panther would bring to us, sources had indicated to me that Disk Copy would have a new GUI. I hope that this is the reason why it has disappeared from the Utilities folder and that a new one will appear on later builds. I also noticed something while trying to mount an image – there is no application opened so I guess this task is now integrated on the Finder.

There have also been several questions about fast user switching. Some asked if it was secure and I can say that it is, as anytime you switch from a user to another, if this user has a password set, this password will be requested each time. When Steve Jobs showed it during WWDC, he had set the password to blank for the second user to make a quick demo of it. The second concern of readers was the multi-threading capability when two users are logged in simultaneously. I tested this feature a lot. While I was installing xCode, I switched to another user and started surfing the net. I then switched back to my main user and started compiling one of the xCode featured examples then I finally switched back to the first user for web surf. Everything run quite smoothly as if it was the same user.

As shown by Steve Jobs during WWDC, Mail has been improved too. I could notice a significant performance improvements especially for the rendering of mails but I did not test it with my real big mailbox, which has more than 10,000 e-mails ;). Mail has also brought 'organize by threads' feature which is really cool and an improved junk mail filter which now has its own pane on the Mail preferences. There's good news for those who are using multiple mail providers and have more than one smtp servers. There is now an smtp server list editor to be able to manage your smtp servers. It's quite annoying, on the current version, to have to go through xml mail configuration files to delete one of your smtp servers so I'm happy that it's fixed.

As I have a home network running Red Hat and Solaris here, I tried to connect to my network's workgroup, find a shared volume and mount it. "Connect to server" feature is still here. It is slightly improved and it is now easier to manage favourite shared items and there is a Browse button that brings you to a Finder window with the Network item opened. It seems SMB browsing from the Finder is only partially implemented at the moment. I could reach my local server but when I double-clicked on it, it couldn't show any shared items. I guess it will be fixed for the final version though. SMB networked printers browsing works fine though. It shows any SMB shared printer automatically without even having to type a URL or a path to connect it. You only have to enable or disable the shared printers you want to use.

After several days of use, I've noticed some other cool features:

- Date & Time preferences pane that has been slightly improved – there are now two ways to display date and time, as you can see from this screenshot.

- Switching from one application to another using the Apple-Tab shortcut now brings a cool transparent application switcher that shows you which application you're switching to. It is really useful when you have a dozen applications launched at the same time – note that it's a feature we had on Mac OS 9.

- It is also important to notice that there is a new Keyboard & Mouse pane which brings the possibility of creating your own shortcuts for any application. Some readers asked me if it brought back the Mac OS 9 feature that allowed launching of any application with assigned function keys. I think I'll disappoint you, but I could not manage to do that with this new pane and I think this feature is not implemented. There are some already set shortcuts organized by categories: Screen Capture, Universal Access, Keyboard Navigation and Applications.

In terms of performance, Panther is not showing significant improvements yet but I'm sure the final version will be faster. I tried a test a suggestion made by a reader. I used the CPU Monitor (which is now part of the Activity Monitor and not longer a separate application) and I tried some basic tasks. First I tried running the mouse through the dock with magnification at 100%, the processor activity was at around 90% and the dock animation was as smooth as on Jaguar. Then I continually resized a Finder window and a Safari Window with a web page loaded. The processor monitor was at 100% but I noticed that the redrawing was more smooth than on Jaguar on both the Finder and on Safari. The Mac I'm using for the tests is a PowerBook Titanium @ 800Mhz with 1Gb of RAM and an external FireWire/USB2 2.5" hard drive (IBM Travelstar - 4200rpm/30Gb).

I had a lot other minor questions on Panther, I'm going to answer briefly:

- Is Cut and Paste feature to move files implemented? No it isn't.

- Is Safari improved? No it isn't but sources claim there will be a new version until Panther ships.

- Is the Finder FTP browser authentication/privileges bug fixed? No it is still has the read only bug but it seems they are working on it.

- Does Panther mount NTFS files? Yes, but in read only mode at the moment.

- Does Panther run smoothly on my iMac rev A? It runs as smooth as Jaguar at the moment but things like iChat effects or fast user switching 3D animation are getting quite heavy for it. Actually if your Mac can run Keynote fine at 1024x768 then it will run Panther with all its effects fine.

- Can we choose between Aqua and brushed metal interface for the Finder? No, but you'll quickly get used to this new look ;).

- Does the spring loaded feature work on the folders that are placed on the dock? No

As you see, the result of your hundreds of questions is that this is one of the biggest postings I ever written ;). I think I have answered almost all of your questions about Panther 7A179 and I hope that you are happy with this second report. I'm not sure there will be a part 3 for this build as newer builds with new features and fixes may come soon. It all depends on the number of exciting new features I may discover on that build and of the number of new interesting questions I receive on my mailbox.