I said I was a total upgrade whore, and so I am. Within three hours of Apple's new version of OS X going on sale, I had Tiger installed on my laptop. Most of the changes are more subtle than in prior releases, and I haven't had all that long to play with it, but here are my initial impressions...

1. The new eye-candy for this version is the Dashboard. Like Expose, it looks really cool, and may be useful to some people. But for real usefulness, I'd like to have the widgets more persistent. Maybe sitting minimized but visible on a dock-like area of the screen, and pop out when you mouse over them. The graphics and effects for adding and removing widgets are utterly gratuitous (but cool).

2. Spotlight, the new global search function, sounds like it has promise. However, it took two hours to index my drive and as a result I haven't had much chance to play with it. But the couple times I've tried it, it worked really nicely, and as promised. Just as most other reviewers are saying, this could be the most important new feature.

3. The smart mailboxes in Mail are really useful, but the UI redesign is totally gratuitous. Apple, can we please have the old UI back?

4. Changes to the Finder and iCal are minor (at least as visible to the user).

5. The best thing about the new version of Safari is that you can now read PDFs in-line. No more littering your download folder with old PDF files any more. I use Bloglines as my RSS reader, which by all accounts is superior to Safari's built-in RSS reader anyway, so no change for me there. Seeing the RSS icon in Safari is helpful, though, since it tells me if I can read a site in Bloglines.