And speaking of the Desktop, all volumes and removable disks show up on there by default and behave as in OS 9 when you double-click on them. The other most visible aspect of the new interface is the Dock, a feature that seems to inspire love and hate in equal quantities. In previous beta versions of the OS, Apple had added customisation, allowing the Dock to reside on any side of the screen and to grow from corners rather than outwards from the centre of an edge. This feature was removed by Apple, but we're happy to report that it's still there. Since Quartz is based on Adobe's PDF standard, bitmap icons scale smoothly at all resolutions, and since the scaling uses vector calculations, this happens very quickly.
Speed is generally very good - certainly an order of magnitude faster than the beta.
Live window dragging is a smooth as silk, window redrawing has a satisfying snap to it and because of Quartz's multi-layered window server, window contents don't have to be redrawn as other windows are dragged over the top of them. Of course you can now happily let files download in the background with more peace of mind than under OS 9. Oh, and it hasn't crashed once, after 10 days of continual testing. Individual applications have crashed, sure, but the OS allows these errant processes to be simply terminated. Application support is, of course, the big question.