In the mean time, I've shipped my faulty hard drive to some data recovery company in the UK, which should now be working on recovering my 18Gig of data. Just FYI, this comes with a quote and an estimated cost of repair (upon recovery of 100% of the data) of £595. If they fail to recover part of the data (which is to be suspected since the media surface was somehow damaged as described in their preliminary analysis report), that fee should be proportionally reduced. The hairy bit is that I needed to sign off a sheet which stated that they could not be held responsible for any (additional) loss of data due to the recovery process, so if they mess up, I don't get to pay, but it won't be easy to ship the drive to another recovery shop. So it's an all or nothing operation. After spending some splendid F2F time with my new TiBook, I'm also slowly realizing how much data I lost, so I'm actually quite eager to hear from the recovery shop.
On the TiBook front, after the initial falling-in-love, I'm beginning to find some (mostly minor) annoyances as well. I really miss the Alt-Tab switching I've grown accustomed to, but IIRC that should be coming back in the forthcoming Panther edition. The fact that I need to install a (free) application to minimize all apps and show the desktop and that keyboard mappings for "selecting the adjacent word" aren't consistent at all between apps is troublesome at best. There must be some logical explanation for the difference between the Apple key and the Option key (or is the Command key?), but the logic evades me at the moment. Shipping an Azerty keyboard without labeling the keys needed for | (Alt-Shift-L), {} (Alt-5 and -°), [] (Alt-Shift-5 and -°) and ~ (Alt-N) seems very awkward for an OS which brags about having Unix underneath a nice GUI... ever tried bash without the pipe symbol, or Ant without curly braces?
But these are all minor gripes, and habits of the past I need to break free from: this is what switching is all about. My main problem today was finding some decent graphics app, similar to JASC's PaintShopPro on Windows. I tried installing the trial version of Fireworks MX 2004, but it bombed out (well, not literally) upon program execution - nearly trashing the OS along its way. So I'm not motivated at all to shell out 299$ for the real version, if I can't get the trial working as a test. I looked at Canvas, but it seems pretty boring and more destined towards technical drawing. So if anyone knows a decent, not too expensive graphics program for Mac OS X, please yell.
Using LiteSwitch X you can get alt-tab switching working very nicely. I use it together with MaxMenus which gives nice hotspots in the screen's corners for quick access to various collections of data / software.
About the graphics app, not sure what you're exactly looking for, but you can always use Fink and install The Gimp. I use it in combination with Photoshop.