I’ve been working with Apple’s new operating system for a couple weeks now and figured I’d post up some of my observations.

• The overall level of visual polish is higher then any previous OSX release. The entire system feels more cohesive.
• The new dock is an atrocity. But I rock mine on the left of the screen so I get the much more pleasing alternate dock.
• I thought the new transparent menu bar would bug me, but so far it hasn’t.
• Spotlight is actually usable. Fast enough to make a great app launcher and search results appear faster and seem more relevant.
• The new ToDo’s and notes features in Mail are a great addition and I can see myself using them regularly. But currently they’re almost unusable if your making ToDo’s within Notes. There seems to be a bug that decides to randomly make items you’ve designated as ToDo’s in your notes… to not be ToDo’s but just sentences of text.
• It’s nice having a system wide ToDo’s system. But it would be helpful if they were color coded in mail in accordance to the color of the calendar they’re associated with.
• The new Mail.app is much improved in terms of performance and features. But also suffers from a bug that randomly decides to not show your message in the bottom preview pane unless you select it twice.
• I’m finding Spaces to be super handy. Other’s are finding issues with how it’s been implemented. I understand the issues being argued, but my personal workflow hasn’t really hit it (yet).
• You can now double click an image embedded in an iChat window and it’ll open in preview. This was previously only doable if you’ve installed the Chax plugin.
• iCal is much better at handling Exchange based calendar invites (and changes). Not perfect mind you, but much improved. They also seem to have done away with the asinine requirement of having your email being defined in the invite in order for you to accept it. Which was a tremendous pain in the ass for invites sent to mailing list groups.
• As great as the iCal improvements are, it seems riddled with as many bugs as Mail. My alerts no longer work, which is torture for someone who relies on them. And there are times where it will not allow me to pick the calendar I would like a meeting invite to be placed in.
• When you take a selective screenshot, you now get X&Y coordinates next to your cursor. And when you start creating your screenshot selecting, it displays the height and width of your selection. This is super cool. (And it’s small touches like this throughout the OS that make it awesome.)

There are many other cool new features and a few more minor annoyances, but these are the items I come across and affect me on a day-to-day level.