Plaidophile

The new Finder is pretty slick. The shelf can be hidden (though so far I'm indifferent to it finding it extremely handy), and when you launch an application the icon zooms in very nicely. It's a cute effect which looks a lot better than the old expanding rectangle. Also, there's much better focus feedback for items, and everything's just on the whole Better.

The new look and feel is nice. It's still aqua, but not annoying and overdone. The stripes are all gone. It's much easier on the eyes.

Monitor calibration is extremely thorough in Expert mode. It does a far better job than any of the tools I'd cobbled together.

network shares are totally transparent. They're just browseable like ordinary folders, and you don't have to worry about "connections" or any of that other stuff. I just configured iTunes to stream my entire library off of my file server over SMB and it works perfectly. 1:55 AM Or maybe not. I think there's something wrong with my Samba configuration, 'coz the automounting-ish stuff isn't working right anymore. But I can still stream my mp3s off of Samba if I manually mount it anyway. 11:47 AM It was Samba. It's working transparently, automounter-style again. SEXY!

If you have a bluetooth phone in range, then you can dial numbers directly from the address book application. I have a strong suspicion you can do it from email too. Let me check.

Nope, you can't. Oh well.

Exposé is actually pretty neat, though it mostly seems like eyecandy so far. I haven't had a reason to really try it yet though. It still runs pretty well even without Quartz Extreme.

Oh, and Fast User Switching doesn't do the cube effect without Quartz Extreme. Oh well. Still, as a whole it's much slicker, nicer, and prettier than WinXP's, while also having a nice and modest appearance.

The whole OS feels extremely fast and snappy. At one point I was installing several apps simultaneously and the hard drive was swapping like crazy, and yet iTunes never skipped once, and the rest of the OS stayed totally responsive. It feels like BeOS. I've missed BeOS.

Salling Clicker works very nicely.

Unfortunately, it seems that iSync barfs if you have two separate systems syncing with the same devices and with each other. For now I've disabled sync to my phone from the iBook. When I get a Powerbook of my own I'll probably just sync to the Powerbook instead.

I hope there's an option for Mac-to-Mac sync without .Mac eventually. The way iSync is designed it looks like there needs to be a single central canonical server, though, but if there were, like, a personal or corporate iSync server option then I'd totally jump right on that. I sure don't need .Mac for anything else.

The new Mail.app is a nice incremental change over the old one. I haven't played with its spam filtering since I prefer to do it server-side with bogofilter and procmail. (On a related note, I finally got around to setting up my own IMAP server and use fetchmail to grab all of my POP accounts into it, which is much more important now that I have two systems accessing my mail at once.) I like the way that it handles address objects, too.

Lots of interface widgets are different... much more visible and accessibility-friendly, for example, and they seem to be better-arranged.

Also, pretty much all of the common controls now have a "utilities" dropdown where you can insert AppleScript and so on. You can also attach AppleScript to folders, which I'm sure can be used to do all sorts of nifty BeOS/Plan9-ish things.

The whole OS makes much better use of motion than before. All motion effects are subtle but make the whole experience seem much less jerky. And, unlike WinXP, the motion effects don't dominate the screen or take priority over the operation of the system.

Also, one of my big gripes before (the Dock pushing windows around) is now gone. The Dock just behaves like any other window now (aside from always being on top, of course).

XCode is just sexy. It's not a total rewrite of ProjectBuilder, just some incremental changes to it which doesn't really warrant a name change, but it's still rather neat. One of these days I should get around to porting my 3D engine to OSX as a native app, or at least play around with a ProjectBuilder build environment at least.

12:40 AM HOLY CRAP!!! All of the keyboard bindings are CONFIGURABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Also, "full keyboard access" actually does something useful now (namely it lets you tab between all controls in an app, not just keyboard-focusable ones).

All in all, this OS release is just amazing. If you have a Mac, definitely get this upgrade. If you don't have a Mac, definitely get one.