Three things.

First, Mac OS X Tiger is coming out on April 29th. There are all kinds of details about it over on the Apple site. I am excited about this. Hopefully, boolean and I will be able to get a family pack or something, since we somehow ended up with four Macs in the house. Not quite sure how that happened.

Second, I cannot remember the last time I was actually excited about an OS update. As far back as I can recall, Windows updates have always just made me angry, to the point with Windows XP SP2 I opted out entirely. Linux updates never really made much difference in my life because I just never really cared enough about it to notice. Linux didn’t annoy me quite as much as Windows did, but it also didn’t really change how I worked. Instead of spending a lot of time fighting with bad UI design I got to fight with a basic lack of UI design (bad UI design makes me angrier, because someone does that stuff on purpose). Either way, I spent way too much time fighting with instead of using the technology on my machines. I am officially too old and too busy for that any more.

Mac OS X is a much different story. I’ve only been a Mac user since November 2004, but I’ve been using computers since sometime in 1982(?) So, out of roughly 22 years of computer time, I’ve spent the last four months using Mac OS X. I am already quite adamant about not wanting to work another way now. You can pry my PowerBook out of my cold dead hands, and all that. OS X has significantly changed how I work, and I am almost brimmingly exhuberant about the whole thing. Mac people aren’t cultists, I’ve realized, they’re just really happy with their technology and want to share the joy. So, really, start socking away some looneys in the change jar and get you some of that.

Third, I decided to throw $80 at the OmniOutliner people for a family pack upgrade from OmniOutliner 2 to OmniOutliner Pro 3. Verdict: It’s worth it. Already my TODO list is more organized and manageable than ever before, and I can see using the app to do documentation, planning, presentations (it exports to Keynote), shopping lists, project planning, etc, etc. Formatting and control is much improved over version 2. I really like it when good software isn’t stupidly expensive.