Yep! Even more telling is that OSX has been out and popular for years, with the fairly intuitive and revolutionary os design. I'm using it right now, in fact, and there's still times I look admiringly at how it operates, so stylish and pretty.

Ease of use is interesting. I thought it was going to be a nightmare, but after the whole 'why the fuck aren't half the keys working?!' thing it's starting to straighten out. Middle click to dashboard with calculator == godsend for me as I'm ALWAYS using the calculator.

And, hell, whenever anybody speaks on Instant Messenger I have a duck popping up in my panel. Which flaps it's wings. This makes me happy.

Adium is my favorite chat program from any platform. It's so well designed! Much love.

Other programs that get a lot of mileage: Quicksilver (cannot navigate without it!), democracy, igetter (download manager), transmission (the most simple, straightforward bittorrent client), writeroom, cyberduck, comical.

Quiksilver is AMAZING for geeks. I've still not come even close to plumbing its depths. Most of those other programs I don't use as much - I'm an Azureus fan, for one.

My biggest programs are Camino (Firefox still feels slow to me), Path Finder (best file manager for the Mac, ENTIRELY worth the money), iTerm, and VLC. Oh, and XWords - with a little bit of individual effort it becomes a perfectly decent Scrabble replacement. And, as already mentioned, Adium. Far and away the best IM client I've ever used. I also use Liquid Ledger to keep track of my finances - much simpler than Quicken for my somewhat limited needs.

What is Liquid Ledger? I've got Quicken free with my Mac, but I"m not especially feeling the love...

Liquid Ledger: [link]

Man, am I so glad I didn't post here earlier. My Tivo remote stopped working for the Tivo (still did for the tv). I thought I'd gotten it miscoded somehow and went online to find how to get my codes. When I realized that the dog had sat on it and switched it from SAT to TV. Oops.

Liese, you can now tell about how advanced Biscuit's butt is!

Except I keep trying to press the right mouse button. It's driving me insane.

I've spent my entire computer life switching between unix mice, mac mice and laptop trackpads on a daily basis. Throw in the occasional ms mouse...I don't even think about it anymore. But if you are used to just one, it's got to be crazymaking.

The one-button-that-you-can-click-on-both-sides design is very pretty, but not as responsive as two REAL buttons would be

I must chime in with my concurrence that if you can't get used to it, any usb mouse will do.

Also, have you tweaked it at all, in the Keyboard and Mouse control panel [link] It can't do anything about the tactile difference, but it might help.

It took a while for me to get used to electric keyboards after growing up with a manual typewriter, too. hee.

(Although one would have to equate the touch mouse with a membrane keyboard, which I still haven't quite gotten used to.)

Liese, you can now tell about how advanced Biscuit's butt is!

Ha! It's really a tiny button. And it's a switch, not actually a button. It's possible he didn't do it by sitting, but did it surreptitiously with his paws so that I couldn't watch tv and paid more attention to him.

It backfired, though, because it got the tv stuck on Discovery during Mythbusters and then Most Dangerous Catch. Which was very addictive.