I had been in no rush to move up to this latest iteration, being largely satisfied with 10.4, but brother G kindly laid a copy on me over the holiday weekend. Installation went uneventfully, and a sampling of my main apps does not indicate that any have broken under the new environment. Even my trusty old LaserJet 6MP still prints. All to the good.

The shiny new 3-D dock has been the object of much scorn in the mac blogosphere. The effect can be banished with a single line in the terminal.app, or by positioning the dock at the left or right side of the screen, but I find it unobjectionable. Much has been made, as well, of the uninformative new folder icons, but I realize that I scarcely ever use the icon view anymore, having years ago become converted to the column view (even on my wheezing antique OS 9.2 box at work it's almost universally list views for me). The dock excepted, there's overall something subtly and appealingly more austere about the look of this one compared to "Tiger" (to say nothing of the early "pinstripe" iterations of OS X, which look almost garish against this one), as though something of the sombre elegance of the old NeXT genome was starting to express itself in this distant descendant.

"Spaces," as widely lauded as the dock has been disparaged, strikes me as the solution to a problem I don't have, and I do not invoke the feature. It would be pleasant to say the same about "stacks," which interferes with my established practice of invoking a nice compact listview of my principal apps, or rather their aliases, from a docked folder, but for this I will need to purchase [link|http://www.brockerhoff.net/quay/|Quay], a modestly-priced little utility that restores the lost functionality.

The "coverflow" view option has a certain "wow" factor, and has impressed a couple of Windowcentric visitors who have looked over my shoulder ("White man's juju," I tell them. "Heap big Mac magic"), but I don't anticipate invoking it much in practice. On the other hand the closely-related "quicklook" mode, which appears to function something like a Dashboard widget, I have found very useful already, and I have assigned it as a default view option in the toolbar of all my Finder windows.

"Time Machine" combines some interface eye candy (more juju for the uncircumcised savages—that and a new screensaver mode that creates passable photomosaics from one's iPhoto archives) with impressive functionality. I dedicated an external Firewire drive (one of three extant) to serve as the target, and now I can retrieve the state of my internal HD back to a week ago. Shitcan a file on Tuesday and "Secure Empty Trash?" "Save" instead of "Save as?" Nichto problemo: Time Machine will fetch it back from Monday night. Brother G and I had the identical reaction: "What a boon for law enforcement!" Because, after all, TM squirrels it all away, including those indiscreet passionate emails from yer little bit on the side that you'd prudently discarded, the downloaded mollusc porn files that you'd thought better of, the preliminary schematics, done on spec for al Qaeda, for an airline seat whoopie cushion to be smuggled aboard a domestic flight where it will not function as a flotation device—all these are potentially open to prying eyes in TM, and for that matter to accidental discovery via the coverflow and quicklook viewing options. Now while I haven't anything particularly compromising on my machine, I did the other day come across a forgotten download, a collage of nude photos of a well-known right-wing radio scold (taken thirty years ago by an old boyfriend of hers to whom I used to listen when he was an LA DJ in the late 1950s, and unchivalrously released for public delectation by him after she lobbed a couple of stones in the culture wars from the supposed safety of her lead-crystal bunker—but I digress), and this might have been embarrassing to have flicker into view in mixed company. It's rather overdue, but I think I'll start organizing my files much more systematically.

Safari 3—finally—alerts one against the possibility of closing an open window with multiple tabs when one intended merely to close a single tab. All to the good. It's also the application that seems most improved, subtly, in its "look and feel."

No doubt there are plenty of features and flaws I haven't explored/stumbled into yet. The first impressions are, as you will have gathered, overwhelmingly positive.

cordially,