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– Ponderings & code by Drew McLellan –

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Panther

23 November 2003

I attended MacExpo yesterday in Islington with my good friend Alex. As well as drooling over the G5s and Powerbooks, I picked up a copy of Panther to run on my old iMac. (For those who’ve not been following, I have a very old iMac which I run for testing purposes. I don’t own a usable Mac at the moment, but am planning to switch away from using a Microsoft OS (hopefully to OS X) before Longhorn becomes a nightmare reality).

The upshot of the upgrade to Panther is that I’m now posting this from Safari 1.1. The motivating force in keeping my Mac up-to-date is to be able to practically test compatibility of my work on a Mac – unfortunately this means needing to upgrade the OS when Apple say I should. The good news is that I managed to get a deal at MacExpo and ended up saving around 12% off the price.

Before I upgraded, I ran a little benchmarking tool called xbench to see how my Mac would perform pre and post upgrade. Xbench comes out with a final overall performance score after running a good number of different tests (memory, disc read/write, graphics, UI etc). Keep in mind that a new Mac should comfortably score 100 or more. My mac scored, on average, 33. Boo!

So I installed Panther (twice, coz the first time I missed the Options option), and then ran xbench again. Result – 38! Okay, I know it’s still pretty poor, but it’s still something of a breath of fresh air to install a new operating system that actually makes your computer /faster/ than the previous one. Normally speed is traded off by new features. With OS X you seem to get both – no trade offs. I like that.

Whilst at MacExpo we also saw the new and impressive 20-inch iMacs. Only one question remains – who’s actually going to buy one?

- Drew McLellan

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  1. § Jesse: After a long wait my 15inch PB will be in my hands no later than wednesday. I understand the white spot issue is resolved now.. if it is I am glad I waited.

    But ya.. that 20-inch iMac needs a G5 or it won’t go anywhere. I think the G5 will be a huge plus for apple but their unwillingness to quickly revamp their entire performance line is a little of a let down but not a shock. I could use the 20-inch iMac though, if it had a G5. Plug in another 19/20inch LCD and that would save a huge amount of space over the two 19-inch Samsungs that own my desk.

    I don’t need huge performance so I prefer to put my money in portability and smaller footprints but still... no time for a G4 on the desktop anymore.
  2. § Alex White: How does Safari 1.1 perform Drew? any noticable improvments? I guess this means that Jaguar users are going to be stuck with 1.0. A bit annoying that!
  3. § Jesse: That Xbench site is cool.. I heard someone mention before but I had never taken a look. My mirror door got 160. :p I wish I would have tested it with X.2, would have been nice to compare.
  4. § Drew: The best score I managed with Jaguar is here.
  5. § Jesse: That isn’t too bad, its above the average.. hehe. Notice the G5’s? Not a huge amount over my DPP G4 1.25 (180-200 vs my 160). I am surprised.
  6. § Drew: Alex - not had time to really put Safari through its paces yet. I’ll have to look see if there’s a specific ”what’s new” list.
  7. § no1son: hey, glad to see you’re running Panther and Safari 1.1. : ) ’cause that means that my site will look OK to you. i’m trying to figure out how to get that semi-transparent background to work in WinIE and MacIE, and i just found a link to your site. I’m about to go try to delve and figure it out on my own, but i’m a bit of a newb on javascript, so we’ll see how that works out.

    if you have the time to help with this one teeny tiny little thing ; D, my aim is no1sonhl and my email is no1son at superdeluxo.com and my site is http://www.superdeluxo.com

    thanks a ton,
    /me dives in

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About Drew McLellan

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Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Caburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

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