I’ve been following the new features for the last couple of months and I can’t wait for the new versions of Mail and iChat.

I’m only a recent convert to Apple Mail but the new Tiger version looks light years ahead of the current one. The smart mailboxes look seriously funky, and I can already see myself over sorting, just because I can. It also has a new UI look, which to me looks like a third major application skin alongside aqua and metal. Maybe Apple needs to do some standardizing?

iChat has also had some work done to it. I use it everyday to chat to my parents and girlfriend, I’m hoping that the introduction of the new H.264 protocol will improve the video quality over my somewhat limited home broadband connection.

Oh, and the last thing…. Spotlight. I’m really eager to try this out, if it works as quick as it does in the demos then it could drastically change the way I use my computer. Here’s hoping.

I’m looking forward to mid-April the end of April.

It’s been receiving some great reviews and I’m really interested in its templating engine. That’s something I really miss from when I was using my own custom created CMS software. Just being able to edit template files, and not worrying about back-end code is a real plus.

I’ve also noticed some excellent plug-ins popping up over the last few weeks, particularly one for inline editing, which would be so handy for quick updates and revisions.

One other thing I’d really like to make use of, or at least turn back on, is posting categories. It’ll be great to organize my thoughts into groups, making it easier to read only about topics that are of interest.

Anyway, I’m hoping the transition won’t be too painful, I have quite a few hacks in my current 1.3 installation – but I’m sure not quite as many as others who have already made the switch.

Stay tuned.

Update: Everything has been moved over and it was a breeze. It did take a little while to get my head around the new template system, but boy it rocks! Now to utilize my new categories!!