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Over the past few days, I’ve felt like a monkey in front of my computer as I’ve hacked out code for the Cocoa version of MsgFiler. It’s not going to take me until infinity to get out the update — I’ve pegged the end of the year as the release date — but man, I do feel like I’m just randomly typing things out on the keyboard and hoping that the complete works of Shakespeare will magically appear!

Fortunately, I have the help of many Cocoa experts. Steve came by the house yesterday and introduced me to the joys of Cocoa bindings. Last evening, I got great advice from Victor. This morning, Ben gave me some good pointers on how to access the various windows — MessageViewer and SingleMessageViewer — in the Mail application. Finally, this evening, I went to the NSCoder Night in Campbell. The group meets every Tuesday at the Orchard Valley Coffee in downtown Campbell.

I was surprised to see so many people with laptops at the coffee shop, most of them sipping and typing away. It reminded me of the early days of the Stanford Newton User Group at a packed Printer’s Inc. in Palo Alto. These days, Printer’s like a morgue whenever I go there for SNUG and SIPUG meetings. I don’t know how much longer the cafe has left, to be honest.

I got super help tonight from Joar, who walked me through a great many things about XCode, Interface Builder, and Cocoa. Though I feel like I’m learning a lot, I know that there’s quite a ways to go before I can code effortlessly. One step at a time, of course!

The pre-release Cocoa-version of MsgFiler is shaping up to be a very nice update. Already, it’s lightyears faster than the AppleScript studio version, thanks to the fact that it’s interfacing directly with the Mail application. You can work immediately after filing a message — no more waiting until all 10 messages have been filed before you can move onto the next message. Searching is also incredibly quick… as fast as you can type, the search results will appear!