Archive for October, 2003

October 27th, 2003

Panther, get your Panther here…
I, like many of you, installed Panther this weekend and the installation process went without a hitch; I was up and running. The features of Panther are well known and work well so I won’t cover them here, but what I will cover is the apparent lack of quality testing on Panther. Sure, it runs without problems (it is UNIX after all), but I’ve noticed several bugs that should have been caught/fixed before it shipped.

1. Mail draws the user icon over top of email message text when no headers are visible. Hu? you’re wondering…go to preferences and change Show Header Detail to none and send yourself an email. You’ll see the problem if you have an image specified in your Address Card.
2. The Finder’s Show Clipboard window doesn’t refresh when it’s visible regardless of if the clipboard contents have changed. That’s pretty self-explanatory.
3. Browsing large file listings on a network share in the Finder is way slower than on Jaguar. From my unscientific testing it appears they’ve botched the icon caching method badly.
4. On one of my machines which I did a dirty install on (shame on me), the Finder’s highlight color doesn’t change until it’s quit (update: a quick repair permissions fixed the problem, whoot!).
5.Background apps sometimes show up in the Dock mysteriously
6. At an API level, the Font Panel is still way broken in Carbon. How are we supposed to adopt it if it doesn’t work right? What do I mean, here are some examples:

  • Getting color doesn’t work at all, the event parameter is not filled
  • Showing the color panel from the font panel and then trying to show it normally causes an exception in the OS (which crashes your app)
  • Show the color panel from the font panel and click in the Finder and click back to your application, no Carbon Events get sent to your application from the color panel until you close it and re-open it.
  • Show the normal color panel first, then show the color panel from the font panel, oops, no Carbon Events get sent to your app anymore for the color picker…ever.
  • Did I mention it doesn’t actually work, but it’s a new advertised feature.

    • As you can see, Panther could have used a couple more weeks for some fit and finish testing and bug fixing which makes me wonder why Apple pushed it out the door so quickly. Here’s to waiting for bug fixes in Panther 10.3.1.

    Will

    # posted at 1:17 am by Will

    October 2nd, 2003

    Ground control to Localizers of One Key…need email addresses to make the grade
    Hi gentle readers, I (not thinking) deleted the email addresses of the people who localized One Key to French, German and Norwegian. So if you localized One Key, or just want to help us out, now’s your chance. We are working on a minor update which we need two, count them two, strings translated. Please contact us if you can make the grade!

    Will

    # posted at 3:07 am by Will