User manual

A Mac OS 10.3 Panther overview
AppleSauce November 2003
17
Contents
Previous Next
The second mode brings every window in the current
application to the front while graying out the rest of the
windows. This can be handy if you have several Photo-
shop documents open, for example.
Select the third mode to momentarily hide all open win-
dows so you can access something on your desktop. This
makes it easy to find and open a document, unmount an
iPod, or send a file to the Trash.
Mail
Apple’s free e-mail program, Mail, gains more power in
Panther. One big addition is the ability to track e-mail
threads: multiple messages with similar subject lines.
Threads make it much easier to keep track of back-and-
forth e-mail conversations. This feature is currently part
of other e-mail applications such as Microsoft Entou-
rage and Qualcomm’s Eudora.
Apple says that Mail performs faster. And now the pro-
gram uses the same HTML rendering engine as Safari,
so HTML messages should display more quickly and
accurately.
Mail also strengthens address management and Address
Book ties. E-mail addresses are now objects that you can
drag between fields, and you can display your Address
Book contacts as names.
Other improvements are better spam filtering and a Safe
Addressing feature, which highlights unfamiliar
domains so you don’t accidentally send sensitive infor-
mation out of your office network, for example.
Font Book
OS X’s Font Panel let you change font sizes and group
fonts into collections, but it was far from a full-fledged
font manager. Font Panel couldn’t activate or deactivate
collections (handy when you have many fonts), and it
worked only with some programs, so it was more a curi-
osity than a useful tool. Mac users who wanted help
organising and managing large font collections turned
to standbys such as Extensis Suitcase and Diamond-
Soft’s Font Reserve.
Font Panel remains in Panther, but it’s joined by a new
application, Font Book. Though designers may still ben-
efit from Suitcase and Font Reserve, the rest of us may
have all we need in Font Book.
When you have a lot of fonts, finding a specific one can
be hard. You can use Font Book to classify fonts in many
ways, including by project, kind (Classic, Fixed Width,