I’ve been fortunate enough to have a chance to play with Mac OS 10.3, Panther. After around 7 hours I have the impression that this is one very fast cat. Everything about it is faster than 10.2, Jaguar. Of course it’s an early beta so who knows what it will be like when released but I can’t imagine it being faster. Finder windows in column view display instantly, even folders with hundreds of items. Viewing large folders as lists and sorting them is instant. The live search is fantastic and also very speedy. Applications are launching twice as fast as they do in 10.2… most of the in one or two bounces. Everything seems to be stable.

New features such as fast user changing and Expose have thus far worked without a hitch. Expose is really neat and I think it will be very useful. The new version of Preview is vastly improved. Just as with the Finder it has live keyword searching. TextEdit can now save into the .doc format and open them as well.

Networking is yucky. Of course this is to be expected with a beta. Browsing a windows network with OS 10.2 is flawless for me, with 10.3 it’s been buggy. In fact, it doesn’t connect with some machines that worked fine under 10.2. Though I see where they are going with it and it’s great. I’m sure this will be fixed by the final release.

I find it hard to believe this is such an early beta. I’m sure there are plenty of details I haven’t had time to explore… what I have seen is nicely designed and a definite improvement.