From Swordmaker, now coming at ya from the back of the TIGER!
Installation went very smoothly.
When upgrading or installing, you can save a lot of time by selecting the Custom Install option and turning off a lot of the foreign languages and keyboard layouts you won't need... like Korean and the several flavors of Chinese.
Don't believe the time remaining clock during installation (I don't know why they bother including it on any computer... it is never accurate!)... it either exagerates or underestimates the time. It started out saying 60 minutes. Dropped to 50 minutes after doing the initial core installation and then climbed back to 54 minutes... but dropped about four minutes later to say 5 minutes... which took about 34 minutes to finish. I don't think it counts the installation of all those languages in its timing.
Safari was installed in less time than it takes for Netscape 7 to boot...
A word of warning... The default for the system's background is a random picture from your Pictures folder - if you have photos or graphics in your home directory's PICTURES folder, you will find them randomly popping up on your screen blanker or as your background. The system is set to put a picture from your folder on the screen... and it takes it randomly. This applies to the screen blanker as well. If you have downloaded a few of those naughty picture (or taken a few of you and the spouse) and DON'T want them to suddenly appear on your screen... MOVE THEM ELSEWHERE! You can also select a specific folder for the background and blanker to use... but be prepared.
First impressions?
Everything seems faster... snappier. Safari loads pages at least twice as fast... whow!.
A new screen blanker animation is really kinda cool... it provides sweeping, rotating RSS feed text AND the ability to read more about the news if you desire merely by pressing a designated key. The animation is glass smooth on my G5... and other animations appear even better than on OSX.3.
The system needs to be left on for about an hour after installation for SPOTLIGHT to index your files. SPOTLIGHT itself appears as a blue circle with magnifying glass icon on the menu bar at the upper right. Searches with SPOTLIGHT are lightning fast... and include even text imbedded in files... email, text, MSWord docs... and more. Remember those dirty picture files? SPOTLIGHT allows you to specify areas you DON'T WANT to index in the SYSTEM PREFERENCES/SPOTLIGHT/PRIVACY... you can also turn off the indexing of images but that might be overkill. Simply put your private stuff in a private folder and then mark that for no indexing. One thing lacking is a way to lock changes to the SPOTLIGHT preferences... I think this should be added.
MAIL has been complete renovated. It looks completely different but still familiar. It has a cool new slide show feature for emails that include multiple pictures... you can view them as a slide show full screen. As you browse the pictures you can rotate them, zoom, and even add one to iPhoto if you choose. A new Connection Doctor checks and helps you trouble shoot your connection to your email accounts.
The built in calculator has been improved with a new function... PROGRAMMER VIEW... which allows converion of binary to hex to decimal to Octal and back and forth. Not too much use to average users, but very useful for programmers. The calcuator widget in Dashboard is for the rest of us ilnumerate users... basic... very basic.
Besides the very basic calculator, other widgets include a calendar, a clock, and a area customizable (by zip code or city and state) weather report. It includes a six day forcast... Six? yup, only six.
Well it's getting late and I am getting rum-dum so off to bed I go.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.