Mac OS X will be the Babylon to some Mac users: The OS they've been waiting for from the very beginning of the days where Apple decided to start working on a completely new operating system. Those plans, that originated almost five years ago, has now evolved into the most promising thing Apple has ever thought of: A merger of the most beautiful OS with the most rocksolid one. Mac OS and UNIX.

Once Mac OS X is released, things will not be the same: Mac OS X is a huge transition. A transition of which noone knows for sure wether today's Mac user will ever get used to.

For a start, let's have a look at the looks.

The new graphical user interface (GUI) of Mac OS X has been named Aqua. This sort of figures as the entire looks of it remind you of liquid. Buttons look like water drops, while progress bars flow like little ripples in a tile of water. When a window is inactive, it becomes tranclucent and everything underneath shines through. As you can see in the bottom of the snapshot above, Mac OS X introduces the Dock.

The Dock is sort of a favorites bar and an application bar in one. It keeps track of your favorite applications (which you define by dragging them onto the Dock) and the applications that are launched. To the right is the Trash, which works pretty much the same as it does in the current Mac OS.

As you might've slightly recognized, one of the icons in the Dock represents a control panel. This is the icon of the System Preferences. In Mac OS X, the control panels as you know them have been reunited into one window, sort of like it once was in System 6.x and before. Only different.

You access one of the control panels simply by clicking on its icon. From there on, the lot pretty much speaks for itself.

Mac OS X also introduces a new way of browsing your hard drive. Instead of only just doubleclicking icons or navigating through a list, Mac OS X features a set of sophisticated new ways of finding your way through your files and apps.

This is one of the new navigation modes. When you click one of the folders or files in the list, the content or info about that item appears to the left. This way you can navigate through your entire computer in just one window.

To be continued...