With talk of email clients in the air, I started seriously thinking about making Kiwi closed source, something I have been considering for 6 months. In my last post I brought this issue up, and all the e-mail and comments regarding a close source Kiwi have been very positive. The consensus is: go for it.

That’s what I’m going to do: Kiwi is now closed source. Any code in the app that was not written by me (which is very little at this point) will be rewritten. Please note, that MailCore will remain open source under the BSD License. If someone wants to write their own IMAP/SMTP client based on MailCore, go for it! It will only help make MailCore stronger.

The Kiwi wiki will be switched over to a wiki on MailCore and e-mail standards. While I’m at it I’m going to switch my repositories over from Subversion to Mercurial, because Mercurial rocks.

Email has struck a cord with many prominent Mac bloggers:

• No suitable email apps for Mac OS X
• The Rise of the OS
• It could work: a 3rd party email client for OS X
• The Rise Of The OS
• The state of Mac email
• Daring Fireball
• Regarding Mail Pro
• Free advice about a pro email client
• Dear Apple, we want MailKit
• Restarting Innovation
• Michael Tsai: Restarting Innovation
• More Follow-up To Mail, The OS And Frameworks

With all this talk of e-mail in the air I wanted to add a little bit:

I am still actively working on MailCore/Kiwi, and my drive is only stronger after the “features” for Leopard Mail were revealed. Progress has been slow due to time constraints: during the school year I’m a computer science student at UIUC and now I’m an intern on the iPhoto team. So, don’t expect anything an alpha immediately, but I am hacking on it.

Another interesting tidbit has been raised, bloggers, like Michael McCracken, believe there is a market for a power user e-mail client; I have to agree. In fact, I’ve been thinking for the past 6 months about the commercial potential in Kiwi. I initially announced that Kiwi would be open source, but am now toying with the idea of making a Kiwi closed source and the email framework, MailCore, as open source. I’m curious what your thoughts are on this.

Update:

New version of MailCore!

Version 0.2.6

• Updated to LibEtPan 0.49
• Built an entirely new MIME parsing component. Eventually I will expose this so others can build up or parse complex MIME structures if necessary.
• Improved fetching of body text for messages, there are still a few edge cases that aren’t taken care of, but it’s much better, see README.txt for more information.
• SMTP has been reworked internally, and now it is possible to enable/disable authentication.
• A slew of unit tests have been written. If you have tests that you have written, please send them my way!
• A few random convenient methods, like isEqual: for CTCoreAddress, have been added
• Memory leaks fixes
• @executable_path/../Frameworks/ IS once again the default for the installation location. This makes it a snap to put into your apps framework folder.

Download or check out the documentation.

I thought I’d never say it, but I’m starting to like test driven development. I’ve been working in Squeak as part of Ralph Johnson’s design patterns class here at the University of Illinois. After a semester of Squeak, it feels wrong not to have tests. Tests seem to fit nicely into Smalltalk and the Smalltalk culture. Building tests has been an amazing way to explore my model objects for a small Seaside webapp. I’ve put together a few different sets of classes and methods, and each time it’s been slightly wrong. I wrote the tests first, and I’ve been able to build model objects that aren’t (as) clunky.

Now I need to transfer this over to my Objective-C coding.

After working with Smalltalk and switching back to Objective-C, I’m really missing the Smalltalk browser. For those of you who don’t know, the Smalltalk browser is a class browser that you do coding in. You create methods, classes, and edit existing ones in the browser. You only look at one method at a time, and it’s awesome for reading code. The only stink is that the code is trapped in the Smalltalk image. When I went back to Objective-C, I was struck by how much time I wasted doing file manipulation: creating files, moving files, finding the file I want, adding the file to my Xcode project. Why can’t I have a browser that works like the Smalltalk browser but handles the file creation, manipulation for me? Then I can worry about the code, and it can organize it into files for me.

Now if only I had the time to write such a tool….

I’m going to try and blog more frequently in short entries. I’ve been very busy with school and I’ve had little time to write anything or do anything outside of school work.

On a side note, here’s a cool shell trick I recently learned (note: I’ve only tested this on zsh). If you mistype a command, maybe something like (Linux is misspelled here):

scp mronge2@csil-linxu2.cs.uiuc.edu:~/assignment.txt ~

Rather than doing a direct edit, just type:

^xu^ux

This will run the previous command you typed, but it will first replace all occurrences of “xu” with “ux”. Pretty slick huh?

A few of us from last year’s WWDC