Internet Explorer 5.1 Preview is included. I've used it a bit and it's about the same as IE5, which means that it's an acquired taste. Personally I'm avoiding it and moving on to iCab (or maybe OmniWeb), even if it has less features than IE. The Mail program is supposed to be really cool. It handles multiple accounts, both POP and IMAP; HTML mail with images and animation; has spell checking; and even simple filtering. You can filter on one header or text in the body, which precludes unlimited filtering (with two filters and labelling you can in effect do multi-level filtering, albeit awkwardly). Thank Goddess it imports mail from Netscape, Eudora, Outlook Express, and Emailer. I'll have to test that out later. Other than that it's a nice, small mail program that's quite pretty.

Preview is a file viewer, though it only handles simple file types. It does read PDF files, though it's not as easy to use as Acrobat Reader. And I forgot to mention that you can now save any document as a PDF file, though I don't know if it's an efficient encoding or not. Ack, you can't drag documents onto open windows, at least not with QuickTime Player or TextEdit. That's a bit annoying, though you can still drag a document to an icon in the dock. QuickTime Player does seem to play movies ok, though not especially skip free. It's slightly better than in Mac OS 9, where doing just about anything causes a movie to skip. In Mac OS X on my PowerBook you have to do anything for a couple of seconds to get the movie to skip a little. I never used the channels and still don't plan to use them.

Sherlock is also much the same. Indexing seems to be all or nothing, no scheduling, indexing when you open Sherlock. You can also index volumes manually, though that's not convenient. On my machine I can't index the boot volume. But it does index much faster than in Mac OS 9, and it doesn't slow anything else down at all. Sticky Notes is much improved. You can style text, don't have a size limit, and Stickies is more integrated into the OS. You can make a Sticky note out of highlighted text in other applications by choosing "Make Sticky" in the services menu. Which brings me to the Services menu in all applications. It has common OS services so you can mail or spell check the current selection. That's pretty useful if I can get the hang of it.

Other than the Utilities folder, which I'll cover in the next installment, the last application is TextEdit. An improvement over SimpleText, though still not a full word processor. It now saves text as RTF files instead of whatever it used before. Or you can save files as plain text. You can change the whole document to plain text and work that way (which is still not good enough to be a good text editor) and it supports spell checking, including spell checking on the fly. You can also specify the text encoding (including Unicode). I think it also handles larger than 32 kb files, finally.

One thing that you may or may not find annoying is that applications don't quit when you close all their windows. Well, many applications don't quit in Mac OS 9 either. But *no* application auto-quits, which I'm still getting used to since there were quite a few utilities that auto-quit in Mac OS 9. I guess it's less of a problem with Mac OS X since the Virtual Memory is lots better than in Mac OS 9, though it's still not a miracle. (Virtual Memory is not a miracle in any OS, usually you just don't notice how slow the system is until you add more RAM and get out of VM). Hey, no more Put Away command in the Finder, which is how I always ejected removable media. Eject works, which is what most people use nowadays. Also, the Finder now supports one level of Undo.

Ack, no Notepad. That really sucks. I should get some shareware for storing random notes. Notepad was way too useful for that, even if Apple started deemphasizing it by not automatically installing it with Mac OS 9. Anyways, what do I think of the applications included? Not bad. Apple seems to have tried to make everything simpler, more eye-catching, more integrated. Off the bat, power users will dump most of the applications in favor of their own favorites. Heck, they can use the BSD utilities included. Beginners though have a good solid foundation of applications (which will be better once iTunes and such are included in the CD). The window redrawing is starting to annoy me though, hopefully Apple will be able to improve it in a future update.