Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Data Lock: 661 MORE 3.1 documents keep me in 10.4

My guess is that MobileMe and iPhone 2.0 will never work properly with OS X 10.4.

So I need to upgrade my iMac to 10.5. I'm a little apprehensive because this is a PPC machine and I'm not sure how well behaved 10.5 is on PPC. Still it works well on my MacBook. Anyway that's not the real problem.

The real problem is that my ancient copy of MoRu tells me I've 661 MORE 3.1 documents on this drive. MORE 3.1 needs MacOS 9 Classic, and 10.5 doesn't run classic.

I looked at a few of my old files. There's a lot of knowledge in there I don't want to lose.

Inspiration and OmniOutliner Pro will open these as outlines, but both will lose presentation graphics. Brad Pettit's free XML converter will switch the files to plain text XML, and I think it might be able to process multiple files at once. Otherwise I can open each one and save it to another obsolete file format, or I can use CUPS-PDF to create a PDF output classic can see.

This is going to hurt.

Which is why I use Nisus Writer Pro as my word processor. The file format is RTF, and Word can read it. I'll transition to an Open Document Format in a year or two.

This is why I'm averse to adopting Evernote until they have an export tool.

Try not to avoid these traps!

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