My laptop at work finally reached the useless point, and I decided it was time to give OS X a go. I asked for a Macbook Pro, and it came in last Friday. I've spent the past week playing with OS X.

I haven't really touched a mac in years. Before they moved to intel chips, they couldn't run Windows and thus were not a viable solution for me. I need to keep Windows around for gaming. Without the capability to run a non-vm Windows, Apple hardware wasn't really an option.

I have to say, I'm impressed! Part of it, I think, is that I'm shifting my opinion of what a computer is to me. Years ago, a computer was an end in and of itself. Messing around on the computer and learning was what I used it for. I didn't realize this until my experience with the mac, but a computer has shifted to simply being a tool for me now. I've shifted perspective from a tinkerer to user with much less patience. Tinkering can be fun, but there comes a point when I'd rather things to just work so that I can accomplish what I'm after, rather than solving the meta problem of figuring out how to accomplish the thing. I didn't realize appreciate my perspective had shifted until a few days using my mac.

So far, a single program is what moves OS X from good to amazing: Quicksilver. This program is brilliant. Once I'd played with for about an hour I was just floored. This is how I want to interact with my machine. It replaces desktop icons and hierarchical menus with something so much faster. It brings the power and speed of the command line into something that's usable without a ton of memorization. It's amazingly fast and powerful. I haven't been this impressed by a program in a very long time.

After playing with OS X for a while, I've also found that most of my unix-like tools are here. I've got almost all the shell things I need. Things are slightly different, but they're familiar. I've halfway decided to get an iMac already. If after a few weeks of development, the OS X box proves solid in that regard, my next computer is going to be an iMac without doubt (and likely sooner rather than later).