Het is relatief stil geworden omtrent Mac OS X 10.3 Panther. Dat kan twee dingen betekenen; Apple is gestopt met de ontwikkeling van 10.3 óf het is bijna tijd voor de Golden Master-versie. Gelukkig wordt de kans op het uitbrengen van een Golden Master-versie steeds groter. De tekst ‘(Pre-release)’ is namelijk van het ‘Over deze Mac…’-scherm verdwenen. RAILhead Design denkt dat Panther aan het eind van deze maand op onze Macs draait:

Citaat: Well, not a whole lot has happened this week in the Mac World outside of OS X 10.3 hitting Golden Master status. Now we just wait for Apple to start taking pre-orders, which will be sometime within the next 2 weeks (logically). This being the case, there’s still a very good chance we’ll be installing Panther on our systems by the end of the month Verder heeft MacOSXRumors.com de kans gekregen verschillende late builds van 10.3 (7B8x) te testen op verschillende Macs…

Citaat: …I also got the chance to experiment with some of those builds, some of which were not even seeded to developers. I tested most of them on several configurations including a PowerMac G4 @ 1Ghz, a PowerBook Titanium 800Mhz and an iMac rev A @ 233Mhz. First, in terms of stability, the recent 7B8X builds were just as stable as Jaguar. All the applications I tested, run fine on it. I also tried some Classic applications and they run fine as well. Heavy applications didn’t unexpectedly quit, as they did on early builds of Panther that I tested in the summer. I can say that since 7B7X builds, Panther has been improved a lot in this area. We can expect the same difference in speed as Jaguar had compared to Puma. I especially noted the Finder’s and the applications’ menus high responsiveness (shorter time delay). Also interesting to note, I didn’t see even one spinning wheel during my tests. As for Jaguar users still using a G3 and wondering if it’s still worth upgrading to Panther, rest assured that Panther will run faster overall on these Macs. It runs faster than Jaguar even on a rev A iMac. You’ll be limited to the most basic Aqua effects though but this is not a big issue. At this stage of the development, I guess it’s possible for Apple to announce a very precise Mac OS X 10.3 release date. I think we can expect this kind of announcement by next week. As for the actual shipping date, I believe that we’re not very far, I’d suggest late October or early November. It is also possible that we will see separate releases of iCal 1.5, iSync 1.2 and Safari 1.1 before the release of Panther as the versions that are present in recent builds of Panther are final releases. Lees het hele artikel hier.