Ronge

Here’s a cool trick that converts man pages to postscript and opens the file in Preview. Add this to your .tcshrc file in your home directory:

alias preman 'man -t \!^ > /tmp/\!^.ps; open /tmp/\!^.ps'

Then to open man pages in Preview type:

preman NAMEHERE

I’ve been doing some hardcore hacking on my pet project, an e-mail client named Kiwi, and what you see above are it’s first breaths of life. It’s not much to look at, but it’s significant progress.

I am finally able to load the inbox and display messages when they are selected in the rightmost pane. Don’t mind the ugly e-mail output right now, I’ve yet to do any parsing of the headers and the MIME data.

I’ve been using the wicked cool Textmate to do programming for the last week. It’s one of those apps that after every launch you find a new little feature that draws you in even more. Each little feature makes you more productive and your workflow more streamline. Earlier this week I had one of those moments with Textmate when my friend Chad mentioned that when he was doing work in Eclipse this summer, there was this great feature that would allow him to add comments like:
//TODO This is something I need to do
And at the bottom of the window there was a pane showing him what he marked as to do for that file. After, hearing this I played around with Textmate looking for something similar, and there is! If you add comments like shown above to your files, and then run the command TODO, it will display a nice window with hyperlinks to all the things you marked. Very cool: Take a look below:

Kiwi is coming along quite nicely now. Much of my progress is thanks to Cocoa bindings, which have made glue code nearly non-existant. Bindings are fantastic, but they come with a very steep learning curve and I feel like I’m just beginning to grasp them now. Anyway, here’s a bit of what I’ve gotten done in my app:

• Account settings are now configurable and SSL is supported
• Subscribed folders are listed on the left in an outline view
• Unread status is parsed for messages
• Sender information is parsed
• MIME decoding is supported so e-mail output is greatly cleaned up
• Connection support has been improved, resulting in a huge speed up
• There is a toolbar and a toolbar item that loads e-mail, finally!

Of course a picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at how far it’s come:

So what do I have planned once basic e-mail support is complete? I hope to add tab support and e-mail rendering using CSS and Webkit for very customizable output. Stay tuned.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited and motived as I am now to develop an app. I’m revved, so much so that I’ve been glued to my computer for the past few days and it’s sure payed off. Kiwi now has tabs; e-mail is been rendered using CSS, a sudo-preprocessor and WebKit; Major performance improvements; and the Interface is getting cleaned up. Now that I’ve sketched out the app, it’s time to start filling in the details that are going to make this thing great. And I probably shouldn’t say “I” anymore, a few of my friends have jumped in and are helping out now. One of my friends from the University of Illinois, Bob Van Osten, has joined in providing alot of added interface code, including the tabs and many of the interface tweaks. He’s also actively working on getting SMTP up and running, which i’ve neglected completely so far. My friend Chad Weider, has been assisting in writing up regular expressions to help process e-mail. Here are more screenshots, the interface is a little rough right now because of the tabs, but we are working on cleaning that up.

Here’s a new Kiwi screenshot: