OK, it’s 12:22pm. Taking my lunch on my work at home day to install Tiger. It showed up at 11:45 by FedEx. It was hard but I put it aside to finish up some work I had to get done. It was hard but I did it. I just finished the cloning of my 10.3.9 system on the G5, and restarting to boot up off the install DVD. While we’re on that subject, it only came with a DVD, no install CDs. I bought the family pack for my Macs and my Mom’s iBook, which sadly is a G3 with NO Combo drive. I think if boot my PowerBook up in Firewire Mode (Cmd + T) that it will see the DVD drive and maybe I can option boot off it. I’ll have to see. I’ll keep u posted.

The box is nice, black with a platinum colored, raised X on the box. Inside is a trial DVD of iWork, a pamphlet for .mac and a guide. I immediately made a back up copy of the DVD (take no chances)!

I started the install at 12:41 PM, the Language selection screen is new, it looks like a login box only elongated. The next boxes are pretty much the same only with a nice platinum X on the left side of the dialogs. I choose to erase and reformat my hard drive, and choose Customize to choose what I want installed. Hmm this is different, the install no longer has items you can unchoose like iCal, iSync, iTunes, Stuff It Expander.

The choices are the base system, printer drivers, additional fonts, languages and X11. I think we’ll do Base and X11 only please, 2.0GB. It’s 1.9GB without X11. Okay now we’re checking the DVD, we can SKIP that thank you and at 12:43 we’re off and running.

It’s 12:51 (8 minutes and we’re at 83%, something called “Oxford Dictionaries” is being copied. Hmmm.

12:52 and the install is done rebooting my G5. 9 minutes that’s not bad. My last XP install took 45 minutes. Sweet.

I am being shown the Welcome video, it is in fact, the one that was leaked a few weeks ago, a Spotlight sliding across 3D translations of Welcome in lots of languages. How cool.

I took my time getting to the set up and registration questions and a voice came on and asked me if I needed the voice over service to set up my Mac! How cool! The screens were normal fare , account name, registration info and also do I wanna xfer data from an old mac, and 2 screens asking me to join .Mac. And we’re off. Wow the screen is much brighter and the colors more rich, or it could be I am looking at my PowerBook typing this and my 20 Cinema Display on my G5. First off i notice the Dashboard icon in my dock and the Apple in the Apple Menus is a very bright blue with a dark satin finish very different than the Aqua Apple of Panther.

I had to click on the Dashboard icon and the widgets flew into the screen like they were coming from behind my head, cool affect but I thought someone said they appeared like water rippling (note to self, check the prefs!). By default there is the Calculator, Calendar, Clock, and Weather (both set to Cupertino of course). Clicking the italicized i flips the widget around where I can make changes. There is also a PLUS sign in the lower left corner which brings up a bar with more widgets on it and a “More Widgets” button. Oooh a translator, drag that on to the desktop. There’s the ripple affect. When u place a widget on the desktop it’s like a leaf falling into a puddle, soft ripples emanate from the widget. Damn Windows has a lot of catching up to do!

We’ll come back to Dashboard later (damn I wish Shawn was here!). Next lets check out iChat, first of all the icon has changed, gone is the AIM Man now just a cartoon convo bubble and a video cam icon in it. The setup screen seems the same except it asks me if I want to use a Jabber account as well as my AIM or .Mac, neat. The prefs screen is different, you can have multiple accounts and just check them off or on. The Video tab has a “Set up Bluetooth Headset” button. Neat.

Okay I sadly have to get back to work. There is so much more I wanna say. I will post more 2nite.

See ya