Now that Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) is here, it’s time to take a look back at Panther (10.3) and what we were expecting or hoping for in its successor.

Today I found a scrap of paper on which I had scribbled the things I was speculating would be in the next revision of OS X. I had jotted down the list of nine highlighted features from Panther and tried to fill a similar list for this unknown “Tiger.”

As a refresher, here is the Panther list, in no specific order:
Finder (Speed, Labels)
Exposé
Fast User Switching
Font Book
Preview (Speed, UI, Basic Editing)
dotMac/iDisk
iChat AV
Filevault
Mail (Threads, HTML Email viewing, Junk Mail Filter)

I was only able to come up with six at the time. Here they are:
Database Finder (BeOS architect’s work at Apple)
2.0 versions of major apps (Mail 2.0, iCal 2.0, Exposé 2.0, etc.)
Better speech features?
Safari 1.5
Menu System (like DVD Studio Pro)
64-bit OS

Before I go into the rationale behind some of those items, let’s just quickly compare it to the actual Tiger list:
Spotlight
Dashboard
Safari RSS
iChat AV (multi-way videoconferencing)
Automator
Quicktime 7
.Mac Sync
Mail 2.0 (UI, Spotlight integration, speed, photos, HTML composing, etc.)
Voiceover
Parental Controls

So the Database Finder item I had listed is Spotlight, and was indeed architected by the former creator of the BeFS.

2.0 versions of apps and functionalities was sort of correct, in that Mail received a major update with its new full integer version, while iCal, for example, got a couple of new features and that’s about it—even though it is still called “2.0.”

Exposé 2.0 didn’t really happen. Instead we got Dashboard.

So many months later I cannot recall why or from where I thought that speech would be a heavily worked-on new feature, though it is interesting that we got a built-in screen reader called Voiceover.

What I thought would be Safari 1.5 turned out to be Safari 2.0, with many more improvements than I could have imagined at that time. Still there are noticeable touches still lacking, such as a warning when you’re about to close a window with multiple tabs.

The menu system that Apple introduced in DVD Studio Pro v.2.0 is where you drag and drop an object onto something and a menu pops up beneath the object with a few different options for how the object should interact with whatever the target location is. At the time this seemed quite brilliant and it still seems only natural that this mechanism will slowly make its way into more and more Apple software designs. Tiger, however, shows none of this.

64-bit is in fact a notable piece of the new OS, though not one that Apple is publicizing to non-developers.

So I didn’t do too bad, though Apple clearly had much in store for me about which I had no idea.