Migrating my mum (OS X)

[Ashtar]

Or a return to Mac after 10 years of MS Windows

After a long reflection, my mum has decided to get a iMac. The decision was brought about by the aging PC she used, by recommendations from her friends and by the fact that the all in one iMac would seriously diminish the cable salad that sits behind her desk. Now that's said and done, here's the facts: I'll have to be able to do her tech support and find equivalent software for her tasks, including migrating all existing documents, addresses and mails to the new computer. Last time she had a mac, it was still something like system 7.

My mum is a dance teacher, here are the points to resolve I've identified:
- Burning CDs from her enormous collection of circle dancing music, which add up to a couple of thousand of CDs in a year. This has a tendency to wear out CD writers. How easy is it to swap out the CD drive in a iMac or should we get an external writer straightaway?
- Her CDs were currently setup in Nero Burning Rom, either as nrg disc images (which should be easy to handle, since it's a complete image) and in nra files which directly link to individual songs on the hard drive. The problem with the nra file is if a song is moved, it cannot be found anymore. I fear I'll have to recreated the 30 or so different CD lists manually.
- Hundreds of word documents, either for workshop programs or for dance descriptions. My guess is bite the bullet and get Office for Mac.
- The labels she prints onto the CDs are made in Corel Draw X3 (cdr files), and seeing the price of a new licence of Corel for Mac, it would make sense to try find a cheaper or free alternative that could import these. For the moment the converter (UniConverter from sk1 project) doesn't correctly covert the files to SVG, so I'm not able to use InkScape for that. Again, if I have to redo them manually, it's another 30+ CD centers to redo.
- Migrate her mail and address books from Windows Live Mail to a mail client on Mac OS X.
- Locate replacements for Audiograbber (CD ripping) and Audacity (Sound editor)
- Choose a website editor, was previously using an antique Dreamweaver (like v4)


I'd appreciate if anyone has suggestions or experience to share, Free (or OpenSource) software recommendations gladly accepted, software purchases are in the cards if no free solution can be found.

[Dogmantra]

On the word document front, if you don't want to shell out, OpenOffice.org has a Mac version, which I've used with no problems, it can open .docs and save as them (though you have to remember to change the extension), in addition to about a trillion other formats. I've not found anything it does significantly worse than Word, and I think it handles images better. Can't help with anything else though.

[Trazoi]

If you're helping admin your mum's iMac, what OSes are you used to? Are you familiar with Mac OS X yourself, or Linux/Unix?

AFAIK the only easy internal hardware to change in an iMac is the RAM. I've got an external CD/DVD writer attached to my iMac (it doubles for use with my netbook too), partly from fear of wearing out the internal drive, partly for ease of access. It's dead easy to backup data files to CDs on a Mac. I'm not sure about audio CDs, but there's a Disk Utility which I'm sure you can do it with. It's fiddly to learn how to use without a guide though.

I use Thunderbird as my email client. Honestly it's slightly broken and not that great, but it works for me.

I use Apple's iWork for my office docs, but I don't have hundreds of existing Office docs I need to support for work.

[factotum]

I've not found anything it does significantly worse than Word

I have--try opening a Word document containing a table of some sort in OpenOffice Writer! That's the reason our company didn't switch to using it after some experimentation a couple of years ago. Oh, and all the cool kids use LibreOffice rather than OpenOffice since Oracle bought out Sun, anyway. :smallsmile:

[OracleofWuffing]

On the word document front, if you don't want to shell out, OpenOffice.org has a Mac version, which I've used with no problems, it can open .docs and save as them (though you have to remember to change the extension),
If I recall correctly...

OpenOffice->Preferences->Load/Save->General. Document Type Drop-Down set to Text Document, and then you can set the default extension to Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP. I've never used tables in a Word document, so apparently as long as you don't use those, you're set.

Thing about the latest Apple stuff, though, is that they kind of expect everything in iTunes and then you just kinda stream them or cloud them or whatever. The "Apple" way to go about things is to get something that'll just play from iTunes and ditch the CD format. Going less expensive, getting a cheapo mp3 player and the proper cords to just hook that up to a stereo for output. How necessary is it to keep things CD based? Come to think of it, most any DVD player I've seen recently can play mp3s off of a DVD.

I'm pretty certain Nero can save as or export an ISO file, which is probably what you want to do to move things from Nero to another program. In fact, there's native ISO mounting in MacOS.

Do you need to edit the cdr files? I mean, the absolute bottom-of-the barrel cheesey way around things is to print those files via CutePDF (http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp) so you have a saved PDF of the file you want to print. You could then open that up and print that, but if you're going to edit those then you're out of luck.

CD Ripping can be done in iTunes. Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/download/beta_mac) has a Mac version.

As far as website editor, you have TextEdit. :smalltongue: It's close to the fully-featured web editor that's used worldwide, Textpad. :smalltongue: It's how the real web designers code. :smalltongue:

But seriously, depends on how integrated of an editor you're looking for. XCode (optional free install with MacOS) has some PHP plugins available. Sounds like folks recommend Aptana (http://aptana.com/) when it comes to price, but my guess would be that if Dreamweaver was used, then she was more visually inclined and might not like it.

[Ashtar]

I'm mostly familiar with a good old' Windows environment, and can make my way around a Linux server install with Apache secured by SSL for the banking industry, so that's covered. I just don't have any hands-on OS X experience apart from an OS image running on my local VM.

For Office, I do know about open office, but I'm shelling simply because my mum needs it to be 100% identical. I have to maximize existing skill transfer.

OracleofWuffing: The CDs is because she produces and sells the music she uses for dance teaching. So it has to be uncompressed (or lossless compression) only, and then onto CDs for distribution.

For the CD centres, I see that I'll have a ton of manual work to do. It's a good point that existing CDRs can be printed to PDF and not modified again. Maybe I can also export them to another format directly from Corel, I'll check this week-end.

I hadn't noticed Audacity had a mac version.

Still haven't decided which mail client to put on her Mac, though. The machine should be arriving this coming week.

[GnomeFighter]

OracleofWuffing: The CDs is because she produces and sells the music she uses for dance teaching. So it has to be uncompressed (or lossless compression) only, and then onto CDs for distribution.


I suggest if she is producing her own music it might be worth her looking at a cd creation service. It may well work out cheaper than the dose of the CDs she is buying at the moment, never mind the cost of replacing writers. On top of that she will be able to get a pro printing on the disk and the box. It depends on the quantities, but is worth looking at.

[OracleofWuffing]

OracleofWuffing: The CDs is because she produces and sells the music she uses for dance teaching. So it has to be uncompressed (or lossless compression) only, and then onto CDs for distribution.
Rats, okay, yeah, if you use iTunes for ripping, I'm pretty sure it defaults to lossy. Gimme a second, I'll update iTunes and see what it has for settings. (Speaking of, while I'm at it... iTunes and Adobe Flash are in a competition on who can release the most minor updates to their programs, so even though Flash is kind of managed by MacOS for this computer, you'll still see a nagging update your software button).

Okay, iTunes -> Preferences -> General -> Import Settings Button -> Import Using Apple Lossless (or AIFF). While you're at it, hop down to the Advanced tab and you can configure iTunes to toss your imported songs into the iTunes Music Folder, so you'll know where all the music is now (I think you'll be able to set this when you first start up iTunes, actually).


Still haven't decided which mail client to put on her Mac, though. The machine should be arriving this coming week.
Yeah, good luck with that. I've had nothing but anger for Windows Live $foo.:smalltongue:

My understanding on things is that WLM is hard to work with other things by design. If I recall correctly, you pretty much need another program around to shuffle things into another client from there. Been a while since I did these shenanigans...

I think you can download a free trial of Office Home and Business (http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/home-and-business/) on to the old PC. Basically, I think you'll just need to get the stuff from WLM to Outlook-not-Express. You want to export Windows Live Mail's messages into Microsoft Exchange (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/980534), then import those into Outlook. I'm pretty certain from there, Thunderbird can natively Import Outlook mail. Now, export with whatever settings PC-Thunderbird has, and finally get the Thunderbird on the Mac to import.

That might seem roundabout, but the only other way I can think of off the top of my head is to rig up a Gmail account to retrieve the Live mails via POP3 and then access the Gmail account via MacOS' Mail program... And I don't know how well WLM will play with that set up, you might need to access the mail manually after so long to keep the mailbox active.

Looks like you could just use live.com's web interface, if that'll work?