[MLUG - DISCUSSION] surprising MacOS X 10.3 features...

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

OK, so I upgraded my desktop and laptop on Monday, but it's taken me 
a week to figure out all the cool new things that Panther has, since 
I was just trying to get stuff done and more or less blundered into 
the good stuff.

So one of my gripes previously was the fairly sad state of Preview,
the native PDF viewing app (Acrobat was obviously superior).  Well,
Preview got a *lot* better.  It now has almost all of the obvious
missing features of Acrobat (e.g., working full-screen mode, better
navigation and zoom, text-select tool).

And then it has some mind-bogglingly useful new features.  A trivial
one is "Export:"  That allows you to (wait for it...) export a file
or a selection from a file into any reasonable format plus a few
others just for fun; this is *huge*).

But not as big as Preview's "find" command.  It's now both
incremental, and document-wide.  So if I type "prefrontal" in the
find box, it goes to the first one, but shows (in a menu) all of the
other hits *in context* and *in real time* so I can immediately go
to the one I really want, or tweak my search, or copy that result
and search for it in all other open documents...

I guess words fail me here.  But imagine reading a PDF book, coming
across an interesting term, and then finding everywhere else in the
book they talked about that term (in the superhandy "key word in
context" form in less than 3 seconds.  (Yes, you can really do that;
I have verified this.)  This really does change everything.  I'm not
sure I want any dead trees books anymore.  Moreover, I'm pretty sure
I now know how indexes for dead trees books are going to be built in
the future.

Probably a million people have raved about Exposé, the utility that
helps solve the problem of "how in the heck do I find a random open
window".  I thought it sounded cute but kind of useless.  As it
turns out, though, it really is the bomb.  In particular, because it
also works for the windows for a specific application.  So pretend
you have 35 PDF files open, and want to find one of them again.  
You *could* cycle through them all from the keyboard, or you could
just hit "F10" (or whatever key you prefer), see them all, and
choose the one you want from the thumbnail (or navigate through the
thumbnails with a mouse or keyboard).  Really, it's just sick.

That said, it does point out some accidental shortcomings of other 
features.  You can't use Exposé to look at windows you've hidden 
(oops), and you can't (yet?) use Exposé to show you all your tabs 
*or your recent history* in the web browser.  But this would be 
trivially easy to implement, so I'm reasonably sure it will be.

And then there's the new finder.  Suffice it to say that that it's
very different from the old one, and since the old one completely
sucked, the new one is great.

And, yes, X11 works seemlessly with Panther, and all of the ease of 
use you expect is there.

I could go on, but I seriously suggest that anybody who hasn't 
played with the new system go at least take a look, if only so you 
can see what features should be stolen for use in Linux.

jking



_______________________________________________
discussion mailing list
EMAIL:PROTECTED
http://mlug.missouri.edu/mailman/listinfo/discussion