Apple began migration of its computing systems to OSX around the year 2001. MacOSX is the Macintosh user experience perched on top of a powerful, fast and stable UNIX base. The UNIX underpinnings of OSX are normally hidden from the user. Current (2009) Apple computers only run OSX. Plaque Simulator X is a "carbon" compliant application, so it runs on both PPC and Intel processor Macxintosh computers under either the MacOSX 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard) operating systems.

The MacOSX graphic user interface (GUI) is similar to earlier MacOS interfaces. A menu bar runs across the top of the screen. An icon for the startup hard drive is in the upper right corner. The startup hard drive is often named "Macintosh HD". Clicking on the startup drive icon opens a window to the root level of that drive in which programs and data are organized in various folders.

The default appearance of OSX windows may differ slightly from the screen captures in this user guide. To match your system to the OSX appearance settings in this user guide go to System Preferences (under the Apple menu) and click the Appearance icon in the upper left corner.

In the System Preferences Appearance pane set the Appearance popup menu to Graphite and the scroll arrows radio buttons to At top and bottom.