Don't get us wrong-- we think Panther is swell. The Pantherfication of the AtAT compound is largely complete, and it's the little things in Apple's latest operating system that make all the difference; for example, raw and blinding speed. Panther's Mail, Preview, and overall interface are so much faster than the equivalents in 10.1 and 10.2 that we occasionally have to brush away an errant tear of joy. (Of course, spending all that time wiping away tears more than offsets any time we would have saved because of Panther's speed boost, but that's beside the point.)

And Exposé is far more than just a must-have window management tool: it's also the best baby toy we've come across in ages. Just keep a photo of the baby's smiling mug as your Desktop picture (or, if your 18-month-old just happens to be desperately in love with Homer Simpson despite your repeated attempts to convince her that 1. he's fictional, and 2. he'd never leave Marge in a million years, go ahead and use a picture of him instead), cover it up with a slew of windows, and the F11 key yields instant "Peek-A-Boo" gratification. It's a surefire giggle every time. The only drawback we've experienced is saliva on the LCD and keyboard because Anya keeps kissing the screen.

Now that we think about it, between the tears and the drool, Panther seems to have necessitated a lot of wiping things up. They don't warn you about that on the box.

But the minor inconvenience of constantly reaching for the paper towels isn't the only Panther drawback we've encountered; despite all its little niceties (TextEdit reads Word documents! The Finder creates ZIP archives! Font Book is... well, it's, um, Font Book. But still!), we've installed Panther on three Macs so far and we're having at least minor problems on all of them. Our Pantherized Pismo is as stable as they come, but we've mentioned our every-other-day kernel panics on a formerly rock-solid 12-inch PowerBook before-- and interestingly enough, even a new Archive & Install didn't clear up the problem. And no, it's not bad third-party RAM; the poor crashy thing's still running with only its original Apple-supplied 256 MB.

While we haven't had any Panther kernel panics on the dual-800 MHz G4 yet, we did have a crash where everything on the screen froze, including the menubar clock, requiring a hard restart. Presumably because of the new journaled file system, when we were back up and running again we found several files that we had saved with extensive changes had reverted to earlier states. Frankly, we'd almost rather risk disk corruption than lose changes we'd definitely saved to disk. (An entire folder full of mail had reverted to an unread and unfiled state as well.)

Meanwhile, even though it hasn't actually crashed, the Pismo has had some definite weirdness with Panther, specifically with networking. Occasionally Classic apps can't see any network volumes mounted through the "Connect to Server..." command, which was never a problem prior to Panther. And how's this for excitement and adventure and really wild things? Dragging a network-mounted folder to the Finder Toolbar (not the sidebar) seemed to work fine and was more convenient than putting the same thing in the sidebar, since clicking Toolbar icons allows you to scroll back up the disk hierarchy in Column View. (Clicking sidebar icons does not, which is our single biggest gripe about that.) Anyway, upon restart the Finder immediately presented the "Connect to Server..." dialog and then would hang with an infinitely spinning rainbow cursor after the password was entered.

Forcing the Finder to relaunch just started the whole problem over again; clicking "Cancel" yielded the rainbow cursor, too. Eventually we figured out that we could launch a Classic app from the Dock (thank goodness we had one in there), launch the trusty old Chooser from the Classic Apple menu, mount the server that way, and then the Panther Finder started properly and allowed us to drag that folder icon back out of the Finder Toolbar, thus restoring the universe to a state of peace and harmony. Fun times.

And so we finally come to the point of this extended gripefest: not even a week has passed since Apple's release of 10.3.1 (which fixed the two nastiest Panther bugs, involving data loss on FireWire drives and FileVault file corruption), and now reports of an imminent 10.3.2 update are already showing up at The Register and (for some reason) Microsoft Watch. According to release notes provided with developer seeds, 10.3.2 includes "changes to networking code, graphics drivers, USB drivers, webDAV, international text support and AppleShare server software." Sounds like we may get some relief from at least some of our Panther problems, although we'd feel a lot more confident if there was something in there about how it "fixes every issue ever encountered by the AtAT staff, past, present, and future." But we'll take whatever we can get.