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This isn’t going to be a multipage exhaustive review as will and has already popped up elsewhere. Just one person’s experience with the new Apple Computer operating system. And really without hesitation, and even with a healthy dose of skepticism, the executive summary is : incredible, a huge leap forward.

Installation: Completely trouble free. Followed all of the directions, even to go outside for a bit (went to the gym) while the system upgraded. Came back just as the OSX Universe was officially expanding and I logged in to the new system. Plugged in my external hard drive and it became the Time Machine disk.

Finder and basics: Apple took a bunch of little time sinks and got rid of them. And they work. Stacks get you quickly to what you’re looking for without a lot of churning. In the stack, you can manipulate the file, look at it, move it around. Spaces took me about 10 minutes to figure out and now I get it. This space is for Web browsing. That space is for mail and calendaring. Assigning these applications to the right space keeps the visual overhead low, just as advertised. Little things like the front most window changing appearance enough to cue you to it’s front status are great. At one point in the first time-machining, the Finder began to behave strangely so I did quit and restart it once, and all has been well since then.

Mail and iCal: Again, these two are improved to add the next level of efficiency. One thing I spent a while with was the to-do feature. There’s now a lot of integration between the two programs, but it’s not very well documented, and a little tricky. Store to-do’s on the mail server or on your mac? How does that work and what’s the real difference? Some test to-do’s I set up didn’t seem to “stick” in Mail. I’m hoping for an update at least in documentation. It looks very helpful, though. RSS reading comes to Mail as well.

Safari: I’m prepared to make this my default browser (away from Firefox). I flipped the switch on that choice. We’ll see how it goes. It’s so cool to see the machine go to a different space when a Web page is fired up.

Other goodies - Apple’s team knows about downloading files from browsers. They ALSO know about PDF-ing receipts from Web purchases (how did they know I do that? :)), and actually have a quick way to PDF a Web receipt and put it in its own folder from Safari. All of this is possible from the Mac’s reliance on PDF as the graphics engine of the system. It all comes together. The dots are connected.

In short, this is what an operating system should be - an evolutionary improvement in computing, in ways that make a difference. As usual, the computing experience that accompanies this system is not just manageable, it’s enjoyable.

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