This week we continue our look at the new and improved features in Mac OS 10.3 “Panther”.

Fast User Switching. Let’s say you have a household with a Mom, a Dad, a teenager, and only one Mac. Wouldn’t it be great if you could turn that one Mac into three? You can. In a multi-user environment, each user gets their own “Home” folder, which contains space for their unique Applications, Documents, Preferences, Movies, Music, Pictures – you get the idea. When a User signs in, common system applications like the Address Book, Mail, Safari (web browser), iTunes, and the like, can only access that User’s data and preferences, and no one else’s.

Now, Mac OS X has always been a multi-user system (as is Windows XP). But the Panther implementation is more powerful, and true-to-Apple-form, stylish as well. The real “cool” stuff comes when you change Users. All Users are listed in a menu in the upper right corner of the screen. Pull down to another user name, enter your password, and the screen smoothly rotates, like a 3D cube, to the new User’s desktop (which, by the way can be configured to each User’s tastes and workflow habits).

To continue our family scenario, let’s say Dad wants to jump on and check his email, while Mom is busy working on a video-editing project. Dad signs in. What happens to Mom’s work? Nothing. It’s all still there, waiting to be returned to. In fact, if Dad, while he’s signed in, tries to close an application that Mom is using, the System won’t let him.

Mac OS X’s email application, cleverly called “Mail”, retains its outstanding spam filtering capabilities. When you get spam, you click a button telling Mail that it’s spam, and Mail files it in a “Junk” mailbox. Mail “learns” every time you do this, preventing future spam from “learned” spammers from even getting to your InBox. Once an email is identified as spam, Mail restricts the downloading of images, circumventing a common trick used by spammers (and, you won’t get a porn preview if you don’t want it). You can even Trash all the mail in your Junk box without opening any of it. Panther Mail can also organize your email by “Threads”, or common subject matter, and email received in HTML format is now rendered using the same engine that’s in Safari.

Ever spent the afternoon waiting to view a large PDF file in Adobe’s Acrobat Reader? Panther’s Preview application, in addition to being a nifty JPEG image viewer, becomes the fastest PDF viewer on any platform anywhere. Plus, in Panther, anything you can print on a printer, you can “print” to (basically saving it as) a PDF file. This is great for archiving web pages.

Panther now has built-in file compression in the Windows-standard .zip format. Simply select what you want to compress, select “Create Archive of…” from the File menu, and the file is compressed in .zip format for attachment to emails, archiving, etc.

Burning data onto a CD or DVD has never been easier. When you insert a blank CD or DVD into the drive and load it up with stuff you want to copy, just click the new Burn button next to its name in the Finder’s Sidebar, and the burning begins.

Finally, .if you’re a Mac member, you can now create a copy of your iDisk web storage area on your computer. When you add or delete something to your computer-based iDisk, Panther can automatically sync that data to your web-based iDisk (assuming you have an Internet connection). You can also synchronize manually if you wish.

© 2003 Peter F. Zimowski