Since you're trying it, I'd like to try and sell you from this perspective: it takes simple ideas that would be at home in the unix philosophy, but applies them to a graphical interface.
Try navigating around the filesystem quickly by right clicking on the desktop (holding it) and then following the directories. If you want to open one, just put the mouse over it and lift.
Something that didn't get much press but which is unique and wonderful to use is the integration between the filesystem and the UI. Email messages are just files that sit in a directory, but the tracker exposes attributes to them, and you can have it display columns for 'From' and 'Subject'. Your inbox is just a folder that contains your mail messages. There's an instant message client that works along these lines too. Users are just files, and the IM functionality is a plugin engine to the tracker. This feels connected to the 'everything is a file' philosophy.
The OSX filesystem is technically capable of some of this stuff (written by the same guy, and later, so it's probably a lot better), but the finder isn't. So even though OSX is probably superior internally, in practice it isn't better to use.
There's a library called bethon that exposes the internals of the OS to python. I've used this with success in the past, not recently. It used to be the case that you could use a combination of the C++ BeBook dev but then piece stuff together from the python console.
Update: Got bethon working. It's a bit of a fiddle in this VM because there's limited disk space available, and sed isn't linked in /bin. But once you get it built the example at http://donn.drizzlehosting.com/Bethex.html works fine.
Try navigating around the filesystem quickly by right clicking on the desktop (holding it) and then following the directories. If you want to open one, just put the mouse over it and lift.
Something that didn't get much press but which is unique and wonderful to use is the integration between the filesystem and the UI. Email messages are just files that sit in a directory, but the tracker exposes attributes to them, and you can have it display columns for 'From' and 'Subject'. Your inbox is just a folder that contains your mail messages. There's an instant message client that works along these lines too. Users are just files, and the IM functionality is a plugin engine to the tracker. This feels connected to the 'everything is a file' philosophy.
The OSX filesystem is technically capable of some of this stuff (written by the same guy, and later, so it's probably a lot better), but the finder isn't. So even though OSX is probably superior internally, in practice it isn't better to use.
There's a library called bethon that exposes the internals of the OS to python. I've used this with success in the past, not recently. It used to be the case that you could use a combination of the C++ BeBook dev but then piece stuff together from the python console.
Update: Got bethon working. It's a bit of a fiddle in this VM because there's limited disk space available, and sed isn't linked in /bin. But once you get it built the example at http://donn.drizzlehosting.com/Bethex.html works fine.