Nevermind, I sort of figured it out by myself. OK, here’s some of my impressions.

The first thing you’ll notice is the new initializing window (pic 1). It looks much better than 8.5’s, and it matches Maya more.

What’s New in General:

ViewCube aids 3D scene navigation:
I LOVE the new ViewCube. It looks a lot better than the compass, and it has a ton more options. When your mouse isn’t over it, it goes into a transparent mode (pic 2). When you put your mouse over it, you’ll notice a couple of things. There’s a little house that pops up, and when you click on it, it goes back to the standard Maya view (pic 3). On top of doing the regular orthographic views (front, top, back, etc.), it can do a corner, or even an edge! When you go into the orthographic view, you notice that you can even rotate it (pic 4). You can drag on it, and it rotates the scene, and even snaps if you get close to an edge.

Also, it has preferences. Lots of preferences (considering that the compass didn’t have any). You can adjust the position (top left, bottom right, etc.), the size (small, normal, large), the inactive transparency (when the mouse isn’t over it), and more (pic 5).

Moving a parented object and not the child object:
I‘ve tested this out, and it’s just too cool.

Make Live works in shaded mode:
I don’t really use Make Live that much, but this seems like it’s a great new feature.

X-ray active components shading mode:
I don’t really know about this one. It seems to get in the way, and the regular X-ray just seems better.

New Replace Objects feature:
I’ve yet to test it out, but it sounds great.

Convert instances to objects:
It looks cool, but is it really that necessary?

Delete unknown nodes:
Anything added to the OSS is good.

BTW, I’m not going to post my impressions on all of the new features, because I don’t know what some are, or I don’t use them.

Still lots more impressions to come……

-Jr.Who