In all the discussion about Intel chips coming to the Mac, I haven’t seen a single specific mention of what will happen to the Classic environment (one of two legacy Mac OS X environments, which runs Mac OS 9 & previous software; the other is Carbon). One or two articles seemed to imply that Classic is doomed, but never even mentioned it directly. These articles indicated that all software was going to have to be moved to Cocoa, which would mean Carbon is apparently doomed, and Classic with it.

I know this will seem irrelevant to a lot of folks, but with 21 years on the Mac, sometimes I’m amazed I don’t use Classic more than I do. I have really only used it for two programs, More (outliner) and HyperCard, but I use it for these two nearly every day. Obviously, I have a LOT of files in these formats, not so many HyperCard stacks but probably hundreds of More outlines, most of which I will need to convert eventually if More is no longer available (or, more accurately, need to convert BEFORE More is no longer available). While I use just a handful of stacks, some have a lot of data in them (up to 925 cards), so I will need to convert these somehow.

Obviously, this looks like a lot of work, so I’m not likely to want to move to MacTel anytime soon (if Classic will be lost). Fortunately, when the time comes, there are some tools that might help. For More, there are two programs, More2Text and More2XML that I downloaded long ago just in case but haven’t yet tried out.

I didn’t bother trying them because I was hoping I could convert to a notes organizing program like NoteTaker and have it simply import all my More files. Unfortunately, I recently tried out NoteTaker and it did an awful job on one outline. I’m curious if others have gotten it to import More outlines successfully or have found another package that does the job well.

For HyperCard, there’s a program called HyperCard Dissolver that may be of some use. I don’t recall what format it outputs in.

In my own case, the timing should actually work out pretty well for me. I’m on about a 3-year upgrade cycle, which I might compress down the road to 2 or so if the updating software intro’d in 10.3 (which moves all your files, etc., to the new machine) works well when I try it out next purchase. With my current Mac 2 years old, I was planning to buy next in mid-2006, right about at the beginning of the switch-over. So maybe I can get a good deal on a phased-out G4 (likely still good for a couple of years) or G5 machine.