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Meetings

Meeting Summary for October 23, 2003

Since Apple was releasing Mac OS X 10.3 Panther, we decided to devote a meeting to some of the new features on Panther, followed by a crash-course on upgrading to Panther. But first, the news.

It had been a big couple of weeks for Apple. First and foremost, there were several music announcements, including an updated iTunes Music Store, iTunes 4.1, now supporting Windows, and some new iPod accessories. Just for fun, Prachi showed everyone the new iPod commercials. Prachi then talked about the new iBook G4 and cheaper eMacs.

After that, we jumped headlong into Panther, generally talking about new features and enhancements. Prachi talked about the new Finder; Exposé; Fast User Switching; improvements in Mail and Preview, Font Book, File Vault, and some updates to the underlying UNIX core of Mac OS X, called Darwin.

Prachi then gave a short crash-course on upgrading, which can essentially be boiled down to the following:

  1. Backup everything to you that you think is important:
    • Documents
    • Contacts, Calendars, and Bookmarks
    • Documents
    • Movies, Music, and Pictures
    • Email, Preferences, Spelling Dictionaries
    • Passwords/Keychain and Software License Codes
  2. Next, choose an installation type
    • Upgrade - easiest, but least safe. Not recommended
    • Archive and Install - safer, do this if you don't have time to do a full backup
    • Erase and Install - you have to do a full backup, but it's the safest
  3. If you do an Erase and Install, you probably want to choose to format to HFS+ (Journaled), unless you're a UNIX user that needs a case-sensitive file system.
  4. Do a custom install to save space
  5. Play with Panther and explore a bit!

After that, we answered some short questions, like how to make a program load up whenever you login, but that was about it.

Download slides from this meeting

The slides are in PDF format with a file size of 7.2MB (sorry!). To view these slides, you must have a PDF viewer like Apple Preview (comes with Mac OS X) or Adobe Reader.