Leopard: now with 100% less Classic

Ultrafind!

For searching text, Ultrafind (http://www.ultradesign.com/ultrafind/ultrafind.html) has not been equaled in OS X. The closest replacement is SpotInside, but unlike SpotInside, UF will 1) search everything, not just Spotlight-searchable items; 2) display every found instance in context in a compact form; 3) has many options for dealing with the found files; 4) has user-friendly settings for restricting searches.

In 1981 I took out a loan for (as I recall) $10,000 and bought a Vectorgraphic CPM2 Machine. When the company sold (out) and my system was orphaned (and I no longer had any hope of repairs if it went south, and the soft-sectored 5 1/4" Floppies had to be specially ordered), I bought a MacII and paid a more Tech-savy guy to port 2000 pages of my work over to the Mac, manually restoring italics/bolding/underlining and other formatting to the resulting text files, in the Mac Word-Processor Fullwrite Professional. That elegant tool did not play well with search programs, and was never well-translated to other document file formats, so when--after another 1000 pages of work--its company gave up the ghost, I had to devise a very long macro which was a collaboration between some portions in Tempo+, and some in Nisus Writer's Internal Macro language. It ran for more than 36 hours to make the 3000 pages of formated Fullwrite content into formated Nisus Writer content. Nisus Writer has now gone OSX, but with a different programming language and file format which has not implemented some features of the Classic program which I used greatly and with great familiarity. And so once again I must move a huge volume of materials into another format, preserving the work I've already done. This will least painfully & most accurately be accomplished by running both the Classic version and the OSX version simultaneously, which would have most easily been done on OSX 10.3.9 running Classic--but my hardware capable of this has had it, so SheepShaver or its ilk is very important to my near-future quality of life. I'm also disinterested in carrying around two laptops. Individuals who speak so casually of mandated changes, are less likely to be experienced enough to have been-there-done-that-been-there-done-that-been-there . . . I've been through 9 personal computers--10 if you count the OrangeMicro I had installed in my 7500, and 11 if you consider my tryst with a mainframe in college--easily spent $100,000-$200,000 on peripherals and software, and software upgrades, and software upgrades, and . . . After familiarizing myself with Basic, CPM-2, Windows 95, 98, 2000, XP, Mac 68K OS's, PowerPC OS's and MacOSX, change is less exciting and generally wearing, and always expensive. Have a little empathy for those of us who wish to preserve the usefulness of our software, documents and working knowledge.

My ancient version of Fontographer only runs on OS9, and refuses to be compatible with any CS versions of Illustrator. I didn't realise Apple had caned Classic, so now these two beauties - and little ol' Adobe Streamline - are just sitting in my sad OSX copy of Launcher with big Xs through them.
Still, at least Leopard finally has pop-up folders.

I run several old applications that would cost me thousands of dollars to upgrade to - but I only use them a few times a year so I can't justify that. I also have many old files I would lose access to that don't have upgrades, including all of my father's files that are in one folder. I don't wish to have to have another machine sitting around and then go through all the trouble of turning it on and transferring files. Why should all the old files be orphaned? Why hasn't some third party developer built classic for Leopard? I would think it would be off-the-charts popular. SheepShaver is too geeky to install - most people won't be able to do it.

Managing Your Money (under the aegis of Andrew Tobias in its early years, and eventually marketed by H&R Block but not upgraded for about 10 years now), the BEST Mac-friendly accounting application ever. I'm crossing my fingers that iBook will eventually be a happy successor to MYM after I go to Leopard on 3 of our Macs.

More; the best outliner is sadly forever a classic only app. Can't believe I paid something like $300 back in 1988 for it and now it's free.

BOLO!!!

Adobe FrameMaker never made the leap to OS X. Now instead of running classic on the G5, I may have to run parallels/fusion in the future.

Fontstudio.

StatView -- most elegant program ever for doing simple statistical analyses.

Not sure if I will be able to force myself to instead use the pile of bloat that is SPSS.