Still in Mac OS 9.0, I set the Startup Disk to partition 1 and reboot, Mac OS X starts automatically so my worries about booting up into Mac OS 9.1 and then restarting into Mac OS X are unfounded. Instead of the boot process displaying a list of icons, there's a text field that displays the current section that's initializing. Initializing the network takes a bit of time, but that's probably because it's trying to access some outside services and the Oracle firewall is stopping it. It boots up straight to my desktop, without asking for a username and password -- a nod to current Mac OS users and something you can turn off (the auto-login feature, that is).

Everything is still as beautiful as before. Now that I have a few more seconds to play around with the Finder I see that it's not quite as fast as I initially noted. Dragging windows around is still lickety-split, but resizing windows is a bit slow. Opening folders is quick, scrolling through a folder with lots of files is a bit slower, maybe it's only loading the visible files when you open the folder, although that doesn't make sense, so it's probably not it. I'm using TextEdit to write this, and window resizing is fast, even though it's reformatting the text on the fly. Another note about the Finder windows, you can now collapse the shortcuts bar for each window, to give them more space for the folder contents.

Today I want to take a look at the System Preferences. Unlike more recent Mac OS versions, System Preferences is a separate application, not a folder with little Control Panels inside. The window toolbar gives you an easy space to put your most common preferences, for when you get hundreds of Control Panels, I guess. It has 21 now and it could easily double without getting cluttered, so I don't know how useful the toolbar will be. Did I mention that the icons are really nice? Big, to be sure, but that's the price you pay to get nicer looking icons.

First up is the Classic panel. You can start up Classic with all extensions off, with the Extensions Manager, or with a specific key combination (for extensions that require a special combination at startup to run). You can set it so that Classic sleeps after up to an hour, you can rebuild the Desktop, you can also set Classic to launch on login. Finally you can start Classic, restart a running Classic, or force quit a running classic. Since Classic is not something I want to deal with yet I wont start it now.

There a Color Sync panel which looks like the previous one, the Date and Time panel is not as nice as in Mac OS 9. You have to manually configure an ntp server (hopefully time.apple.com still works) and the menu bar clock has only four checkboxes for configuration (no more military time for me it seems). The Display panel is about the same, I recalibrated my monitor and that was easy to do. The Dock panel allows you to set the dock size, magnification (defaults to off), and whether the dock auto-hides (a feature copied from Windows and one that I don't particularly like). You can also turn off the animation when you launch an application, which I did because it's a bit too cutesy for me.

Energy Saver only has one set of preferences (no separate settings for power adapter versus battery) and you can only set the sleep times. No longer can you set processor cycling and some other things that I never bothered with. I don't like my system going to sleep, and especially for a Unix system that's just wrong. The General panel only allows you to set the appearance colors, the highlight color, and if clicking on the scroll bar jumps a page or scrolls to that location. It's going to suck if I can't set a desktop picture. The default one is nice, it's the super-computer model of some sort of fluid dynamic, but we all have our styles and a desktop picture is one way to express it.