Eye-popping gadgets like the Dock and the genie window do their tricks well enough to give most Windows users the impression that Mac OS X is a much more advanced OS than anything they've been exposed to previously. This will be a relief to graphics pros who commonly eschew the use of extraneous color on their desktops. Time will tell whether Apple's token graphite gesture, along with the promise of Quartz, will be enough to encourage the graphics pro market to adopt Mac OS X. Most Mac users will doubtless rely on the new Finder as their primary navigation tool at first. Using the new tool leaves one feeling there has to be a better way to get around. It feels as clumsy as Window Manager in Windows 3.1.
Users can view the contents of their drives as icons, as a list, or using the new column view.
It's an easy bet that the majority of users will adopt column view as their preferred method for navigation. Once the window is dragged all the way across the screen, the user is given access to pretty much everything in their hard drive with a single click of the mouse. It's a different paradigm, given that we're all used to scrolling through vertical windows, but it's an easy adoption to make. It could use more polish, or at least be made to look as it does in Mac OS 9. Mac OS X's GUI monitoring utilities, kept in various places, aren't as useful as they could be, and the Dock itself could provide better feedback to a less experienced user.