Killing one bird with two-and-a-half stones in Mac OS X Mail

This story is important to me because it was the first software I ever wrote that shipped to more than just a few friends or colleagues. What started as some scripting turned into Cocoa development, which is not something I ever expected to find myself doing. It never became a full-time thing for me, but it was a fun journey.

Good old version 388. Source: Version Museum

Note: I joined the Mail team in June 2000, three months before the Public Beta. We shipped the first “real” version of Mac OS X (10.0) nine months later.

On March 24, 2001, Apple released Mac OS X 10.0 (internally codenamed Cheetah). The initial version was slow, incomplete, and had very few applications available at launch, mostly from independent developers. While many critics suggested that the operating system was not ready for mainstream adoption, they recognized the importance of its initial launch as a base on which to improve. Simply releasing Mac OS X was received by the Macintosh community as a great accomplishm…