Mainly it was because iCal and Address Book lose that utterly vile skeuomorphic stitched leather look, and also realising my afternoon was slightly free, and I’d downloaded the 5.31GB of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, and I was dead lusty for all the new stuff, so 40 minutes later or so I was booting on my venerable (but definitely alive) 2008 MacBook Pro into the first non-cat OS in 12 1/2 years. (Actually a bit more because I was messing around with pre-release versions even before that).

And that was easy, wasn’t it? (Besides needing to reindex my Mail which caused 20 or so emails from years ago to try and send themselves until I mashed the ‘off’ button for Wi-Fi). Tabs in the Finder? Nice! Not sure I’ll use Tags, mainly due to having a decade of junk on my laptop already organised. iCal’s new look and the Day view are especially pleasing (though adding notes is still not entirely possible with keyboard). Safari’s Inspector has been given a new set of clothes. iBooks! Awesome! Really brilliant that it’s finally on Macs. And Maps! My short play with it hasn’t revealed whether it can replace my current map choice for tracking my training rides, but the 3D view of around here makes the trees look like Krynoids from Doctor Who: Seeds of Doom.

Important stuff like Apache, PHP, and MySQL worked almost immediately: the former just needing its httpd-vhosts.conf file updated; the mid needing the former’s httpd.conf edited to load the PHP module and the last working without a problem. And that is the easiest setup for my localhost environment ever.

I also had to buy Little Snitch, which no longer worked, but considering how much I use it, it’s €30 very well-spent – especially considering 10.9 was free. Oh, and iWork, Aperture, bunch of other stuff also updated. Pity I can’t afford one of the new MacBook Pros.