I think the over-under on that process is about a month. I took to it quickly and have had little frustration for myself. Ericka's had more difficulties (which mostly stemmed from there not being a OS X driver for our printer for quite a while), but seems about as comfortable now as she was with OS 9.

For me, the point where an application crashed and I didn't have to reboot was a seminal event.

I had an OS X box at my last job and I liked it almost immediately once I got rid of the ghu-damned dock. It is the desktop equivalent ofthe blink tag.

From what I've read so far, it appears that the dock is the love it or hate it but by golly everyone has a strong opinion about it one way or the other aspect of OS X.

Me? I don't know yet. Ask again later....

Uh ... no offense, but why didn't you just get a cheap box and throw a unix OS on it? I mean, yeah, I've kicked around a little in unix, and I suppose I some point I'll poke around a little with it on the Mac, but what I've really always loved about Macs is the elegant graphical interface....

Ah. That explains it.

I have to say for me it was love at (nearly) first use. The more I used X, the more I hated having to go into Classic mode for old apps. Took a little bit to get used to where the system put things (and to get used to going to the Dock to switch between applications), but overall the advantages far outweighed the disadvantages. I'm now in OS-X all the time, and very happy with it.

What's frustrating you with X, Fred?

Dude - Command-Tab to switch applications! No more trips to the Dock for that!

Yeah, I know, but I typically have five or six apps open at a time; it's faster to hit the Dock...

Some of the frustration has already gone away -- I went out and bought David Pogue's The Missing Manual: Mac OS X; Second Edition which has been very helpful. At first I really missed the Apple menu, which I make heavy use of in OS 9, but I'm learning how to use the dock and other things to get around.

Right now, I'm tremendously worried about a couple of things: (1) Font Reserve 3.1.2 doesn't seem to want to work with OS X 10.2.6 (at first I though it was not working right within Classic , but now I see it doesn't seem to work at all ... unless I, you know, just start up and work in 9. And, actually, it wouldn't be sufficient for it to run justin X -- it has to run in Classic too since that's where PageMaker 7.0.1 runs.... (2) The Read Me with the latest rev of Nikon software says that they don't support my LS-2000 scanner in X -- and I'm pretty sure that trying to crawl out the SCSI link in Classic will to be more than a wee bit difficult if not impossible (it's a piss when they drop support on such an expensive and relatively recent piece of hardware...). (3) I'm also worried about what else might rise up to smack me in the face. I mean, gee, it's not like I've been out on the cutting edge leaping on a barely Beta OS....

A minor concern is trying to figure out where to stash the OS 9 documents folder -- I reckon it might be handy to have separate log-ins for Susan and Gavi and me, so that, for example, our separate web browsing and mail prefs can be maintained simply, but in that case it wouldn't be wise to dump all the documents into my document folder.

Other than that, I reckon I will get used to it (as I think my question implied) -- I'm just wondering about how long it'll take.

Thanks, Steve.

Ah, so most of the difficulty is the mixture of legacy programs with the new OS... I can see where that's frustrating, yep! PageMaker will never have an OS-X version; my understanding is that Aldus has abandoned further development of the program in favor of InDesign. Font Reserve I don't know at all; Panther (system 10.3) is supposed to have some font management built into it when it comes out this Fall. And a SCSI scanner... (*shudder*) There are third-party scanner drivers out there that support various models (VueScan????) but whether they'll work with your Nikon, I haven't the foggiest. You're right; it sucks when a company decides that they're just going to abandon the customers who shelled out their hard-won bucks for their machine and not write updated drivers.

Working within a "mixed system" is tough, and updating software is expensive. I sympathize!

Legacy? Yeah, you're right about the PageMaker, of course*, but Font Reserve 3.1.2 is a fairly recent release (like the past couple of months) and is supposed to run not only in X but also down into Classic from X. I've got to do a little poking around on the web or something, though -- maybe X 10.2.6 changed enough from earlier versions to blow FR out of the water and they haven't had a chance to fix it yet.

And a SCSI scanner... (*shudder*)

Hey! Don't wince. It's a high-end, high-res 35mm film and slide scanner. We're not talking a little $100 flatbed here....
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*I've read good things about InDesign and am actually looking forward to taking a look at it. I've also upgraded to FrameMaker 7 (from version 3! pre-Adobe!), and it looks pretty swell (gonna take a little while to get up to speed on it, though -- there's lots of new stuff since 3), although it, too, runs on 9 and in Classic and as of yet doesn't have an announcement about X plans.

Pooch stopped cursing after a month

Hmmmm. A month does seem to be the trend here, doesn't it? Okay. I guess I can live with that. Thanks for the info!

I will say that everything does seem to run faster in X.

And that Safari is going a long way toward salving some of the wounds -- I really like its low-bullshit quality, especially after fighting with the bells-and-whistles gang of browsers. "More" isn't necessarily better, don'tchaknow....