A correspondent on the TidBITS-Talk list mentions Eudora Mailbox Cleaner as a possible migration aid to escape from the increasingly frustrating clutches of Eudora, my email software of many, many years. Migration of my daunting archives has been the primary obstacle to dropping Eudora in the past.

Of course, the whole gmail thing also offers a spinning spanner to my email plans.

In other news, I think I have a temporary dataprocessing system demoed at work that will greatly compress the pick-and-pack process for order fulfillment. In essence it allows the pick-and-packer to do a warehouse run in the morning to grab everything in the previous day’s orders, and then to package them by priority and efficiency: multiple orders and special-handling orders first, followed by gangs of single-item orders grouped by the ordered item, which makes labeling and packing much simpler. Yesterday in about three hours of actual packing time I closed and shipped over fifty orders.

Sounds good, right?

Alas, it’s all ricketied together in Excel and Word and relies on mail-merge features. next up is some intimate familiarity with Access. It’s an intimacy I’ve had previously and the prospect of which makes me long for slow, easy-to-design-in FileMaker. A nice hefty reference book was already proving useful this afternoon as I left work.

I would like to note in my own defense that my baling-ware is intended purely as a temporary implementation, and part of the impetus in evolving it was to provide me with enough use-case material that I can develop early-stage design docs as an aid in evaluating third-party prospective solutions for our inventory and fulfillment management stuff.

When FM 7 launched, there was some noise about FM being something like a front-end for [insert fave open source DB here]. Is this in fact the case, FM is now a suite of bolt-on tools for [your database software here]? Cuz it should be, and that would be neat.

As I noted the other day, I’m helping get Mom up to speed on her new Powerbook, over the phone and, sadly, screenblind for the nonce. It’s quite exhausting, something like playing chess while blindfolded with a novice chess player who may or may not understand the verbal conventions used to describe the chessboard but who probably knows the basic rules of the game.

It’s fun, though, to spend so much time on such a minute series of tasks with someone you love. We’re spending two to three hours on the phone or voice-and-video chatting every night. The most challenging part (aside from the blindfolded chess aspect) is unpacking my own assumptions about what a given verbal description of a user-interface gesture means.

Commenters on the previous entry noted a resistance to the idea of employing a conventionalized, consistent vocabulary to describe computer user-interface elements among older new users they’d worked with. Thankfully, that does not appear to be the case with my mom. Every day, she gets a bit more oriented, and is able to both recognize and use the new vocabulary.

One commenter, jbelkin, on the earlier entry noted that .Mac membership grants access to some Apple-produced training movies, which are described as the “How to Use Panther” movies.

If you have the inclination, signing up for .Mac lets you access the How to use Panther QT movies – they start from the beginning and they are as clear as day – there are about 80 movies and they start with MOUSING to ATTACHING A DIGITAL CAMERA and using iphoto. All the basics and some not-so-basics are covered.

I looked and looked, but could not find these. I did find the .Mac Learning Center, though: could these be the films referred to?

I gave my mom the assignment of working through the “Mac OS X Basics” presentations and will check in on her tomorrow to see how effective they are. Then, tomorrow night, I will take my dad through patching iChat to enable USB video sources.

Tonight, we used iChat video and voice quite painlessly for about two hours. For some reason, Mom’s audio connection was unusually good, and I found myself continually glancing to the shelf where my speakers are located, involuntarily expecting to see her.

My parents just began an experiment. My dad bought my mom a Powerbook. She’s had difficulty mastering Windows, probably due to inadequate education and training resources combined with the myriad of little frustrations that can accompany the user experience on that platform, and this has been compounded by my relative lack of experience in acting as helpdesk on Wintel.

I have long encouraged them to consider trying a Mac, and one of my primary arguments was that I would finally be able to provide reliable helpdesk support to them. This will help me to effectively gauge the level of user-experience versus education needed to bring them into a happy relationship with their computers.

This is the first of several blog entries I will be producing to document some of the written support I will provide them. The bulk of this entry concerns local and online resources for reference, help and user education.

One of my future entries will deal with the vagaries of disentangling a LAN to enable port-forwarded service mapping – all from the security and comfort of my office chair, on the opposite coast from the physical LAN itself. Current smart money is on the active presence of two competing DHCP routers in the LAN. That will be fun.

Mac Reference Books
Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition
by David Pogue – Amazon link.

This is essential. If you only pick up one of these books, make it this one. Pogue nearly invented the modern user-oriented computer book, and has been writing in that vein, and about the Mac, for about twenty years.

The Little Mac Book: Panther Edition
by Robin Williams Amazon link.

This has been the long-standing standard introduction to Macs. It is written with the assumption that the user has no experience or knowledge of computers at all. Williams style is exemplary and inclusive, communicating the sense of affection and joy that so many of us on the Mac side experience with our machines. It should be noted that I have not seen this edition of the book.

Mac OS X Hints
by Rob Griffiths, David Pogue – Amazon link

This is a compendium of the public-contribution website linked above. All of us are smarter than one of us, and these hints are great. The website is the best single place to go when you have a specific question such as “How do I…” or “Can I…” or “Why does it…”

Rob’s website is also a genuine phenomenon, and he deserves high praise for the way he took the tiger by the tail when it became apparent that he’d created the most crucial independent information web site for users of Mac OS X. The fact that this good fortune – both his and ours – resulted in publication may do something for those seeking proof of a just world.

Mac OS X for Windows Users: A Switchers’ Guide
by David Coursey – Amazon link.

I am not directly familiar with this book, but Peachpit sets the standard for user-oriented Mac books, and it may therefore prove of value. Anyone actually had face time with this book?

Useful Websites
MacWorld
MacAddict

MacWorld and MacAddict are the two main US-market Mac-oriented magazines. MacWorld’s website is much deeper than MacAddict’s and includes hundreds of articles and reviews.

Mac OS X Hints
Mac OS Hints is the basis of the book suggested above.

MacFixit
MacFixIt is a long-standing, community driven website for Mac users to share knowledge. They have a tiered access policy, though.

Apple
Apple Discussions
Apple Support
Since my parents have Applecare, they are entitled to as much technical support as you’d like. Please note, however, that there is a difference between support and training, and issues which reflect a lack of training will probably produce a somewhat brusque response. By all means, do complain if that’s the case.

Personally, I have found the discussions board (the second URL above) a much better source of help and information, particularly on issues of training. At the moment, the site is inaccessible from my computer, but that won’t be the case forever. I often find myself looking here first for information.

Unfortunately they rotate the messages offline after only about three months, which is a real shame, but this is the online location where you will find the highest density of courteous and helpful Mac users in any area of need you might have.

Other Sites
I haven’t linked to a raft of other sites such as TidBITS, Macintouch, The OReilly Mac Dev Center, and so forth, primarily because those are sites that are most helpful to experienced users. I will introduce my folks to them in time, but not yet – wading through the data at those locations might well prove overwhelming at this stage.

Connecting Wintels and Macs
Connecting Mac OS X to Windows PCs, by Wei-Meng Lee and Brian Jepson. 11/19/2002 article at O’Reilly’s Mac Dev Center.

This article may be a little dated. I know that I myself am in need of a brush-up regarding wintel networking and this may be a helpful place to start.