Converting my most frequently used AppleWorks files to text took quite some time. The longest part is redoing the tabs, since I used custom tabs on the word processing files and I exported my databases to tab-delimited files. Even with BBEdit's grep (and I'll admit that I'm no grep expert) there was still a lot of hand formatting. But now all my current data files are in text format so I won't need AppleWorks except for legacy files, which I doubt I'll ever need to read.

Now I'm recreating all my playlists in iTunes. Mac OS X is not that slow as I'm working, though it's still a bit tiring on the wrists because I have to be more careful and hold down the button longer than I'm used to. Anyway, iTunes does convert files to MP3 format very quickly. The quality is not quite as good as the SWA Export Xtra plug-in I was using, at least at the low bit rates that I encode. So instead of encoding at 48 kbps I'm encoding at 64 kbps, which is not too bad. It's pretty annoying that I can only set the view options for one playlist, no global view settings apparently.

I noticed that the Finder now has the Natural Order extension built-in (it may not be Natural Order, but it does the same thing). Now when it sorts files it sorts 5 before 15, in other words it knows about numeric order. I doubt that the Terminal command line has that feature. It's nice since you don't have to keep prepending zeroes to numbers so that they'll line up. In fact, the Finder almost didn't let me prepend a zero to a filename. It kept deleting it and I had to resort to adding a space then the zero. Once it took that I could delete the space and it didn't delete the zero.

Another thing about the Finder (and these are all little things that I've been pointing out in my journals) is that the Finder windows don't update instantly. I'm used to renaming a file and then when I hit return the file moves to its correct position (in list view). In Mac OS X I can rename files and get them out of order and it doesn't seem to reorder until the folder is closed and opened again. Not necessarily good or bad, just different.

Another attempt and another failure at getting Ricochet to work. Still connects but retrieving a web page didn't do anything. I'll look at my web server log file to see if the request got through. Another potential problem is that maybe iTunes is not handling my current MP3s correctly. There are actually these weird distortions when I'm listening to music (all recorded at 48 kbps, 22 kHz). I hope I don't have to re-rip all my CDs. I miss SoundApp. People point to Mac OS X and iTunes and how music doesn't skip as you're doing other things. Guess what, SoundApp with Mac OS 9 doesn't skip when you're doing other things. When it did skip either it was because Virtual Memory was on or something really bad was happening. More likely though it would just not play the next song until the heavy processor activity ended.

The OmniWeb bookmarks are a bit of a pain. I haven't found a way to rename them or change their destination or even create subfolders like in the default list that ships with the application. At least it keeps the bookmark as an html file which I can go in and edit. I also couldn't change the bookmark file to a file other than the default -- when I tried I couldn't add bookmarks to the file and besides, it showed the default booksmarks which weren't in the file.

I just found another feature of TextEdit -- it renders html files as web pages. It even opens another window with the html file if you click on a link that leads to another local page. Unfortunately, since it renders the html you can't edit the html tags since you can't see them. I also tried to edit the page and save it and it doesn't save to html (it suggests RTF instead). That makes TextEdit useless as an html editor. Fortunately OmniWeb is an ok html editor, not graphical like Netscape, more of a text editor without any frills. OmniWeb does have a Compact and Reformat features. Compact eliminates unnecessary white space while Reformat indents everything and gets rid of blank lines.

Too bad. I had gotten used to Netscape's html editor. Sure it's slow and the code it produces is ugly, but it's nice to use a WYSIWYG editor, especially with the web pages that we use at work (we're table crazy around here). Oh well. That's enough for today. Tomorrow I hope to have the bookmarks done and install a couple more pieces of software.