I’ve been using OS X pretty steadily now for over two years. I’ve had very few complaints in that time and many, many moments of awesomeness-induced joy.

One of the things that makes Mac so usable is the number of really useful keyboard shortcuts that are available throughout the system. It’s not necessary to know these shortcuts to use a Mac, but as a user develops their Mac skills these shortcuts provide tremendous room for growth. Maybe Windows XP has similar conveniences as Mac but Mac just seems to do it better. Take application switching as an example. Windows has Alt-Tab. Alt-Tab cycles through every window. Hurray. Mac gives you Command-Tab to cycle through applications and Command-` to cycle through open windows of an application. Note the difference – Mac gives you a more fine-grained control over the switching. These shortcuts work in Expose as well. Pressing F9 gives a user a view of all open windows – pressing and holding Command while pressing Tab will switch the view from the F9/All-Windows view to the F10/All-Windows-for-a-Given-Application view. That’s cool but more than that, it’s useful.

If you’re a Mac user you owe it to yourself to check out the list of shortcuts on Apple.com – learn just one shortcut a day and you’ll be amazed at how quickly your experience on Mac will transform from merely great to insanely great.