The new Mac platform seems more viable than ever — and I’m enjoying using it more and more and playing around with all the new software toys, too. It’s such a charming experience that I pre-ordered a copy of the next revision of the OS (technically 10.2, but colloquially known as ‘Jaguar’) from MacConnection, which has it for US$25 below list. It’s pretty remarkable how elegantly constructed most of the software is for Mac OS X, from 800 pound gorillas like Office v.X, which is running beautifully on my machine, to intrepid shareware/freeware endeavours like Fire, which makes one of the best instant messaging clients out there, and certainly the most elegant cross-IM platform application I’ve ever seen. Even the Java-based ports like LimeWire are way more elegant than their Mac OS Classic or Windows counterparts.