Living dangerously
This could apply to the illogical semi-annual process by which we spend a lot of money to make perfect good software work by "upgrading" it. Normally it all ends in tears, and takes 6 months to sort out, which leaves 6 months to forget the experience just in time for the Next Must Have.
Well last night I really went to town: I upgraded my Mac G4 workstation to OS X 10.3 (Panther), having first very very carefully applied firmware patches to my FireWire drives, and I upgraded Photoshop 7 to Photoshop CS. Finally I installed the Panther version of ImagePrint.
Amazingly it all worked, and even more amazingly it seems it was worth it.
I had already been using Panther on my G4 PowerBook for a week, and also upgraded by very non-critical Cube first as well. In that context I am disappointed with Panther - the collaboration features with Windows networks fall well short of my expectations, although careful reading of the fine print reveals that Apple delivered what they said they would.
But otherwise, Panther delivers the first really noticeable speed boost I've seen in OS X. It really seems about 25% faster. But the really big deal is Photoshop CS. This upgrade has got more new and really useful features than I think I've seen since layers were introduced waaaaay back in v3.0 (or was it 4?). Greatly enhanced 16-bit functionality would be enough in itself, but the new browser, the new Photo filters, filter layers, performance improvements and much more all make this really good value for money.
Adobe really has been working hard - InDesign CS is an equally valuable upgrade - the performance improvements here are staggering - especially in document scrolling.
However there was one little thing that struck me.... in order to apply FireWire firmware upgrades I had to boot in OS 9.2 .... and I was amazed by how fast it is. Of course I didn't experience a good old MacOS crash or try to do 2 things at once, but still....
