Show HN: Messages for Macintosh – a classic Mac iMessage client

https://github.com/CamHenlin/MessagesForMacintosh

by camhenlin • 4 years ago

211 47 4 years ago

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

I built an application for interacting with Apple iMessages on classic Macintosh systems via a modern Mac. I've tested the software on System 2.0 through System 6.0.8, but it should work on Macintoshes running up to MacOS 9.2.2.

In addition to the github repository, I wrote an introduction blog post about it here: https://henlin.net/2022/02/26/Introducing-Messages-for-Macin.... I've also outlined the development workflow on to other posts at https://henlin.net/2021/12/03/a-simplified-guide-to-developm... and https://henlin.net/2022/02/26/Messages-for-Macintosh-Develop....

Let me know if you have any questions or decide to try it out on your Macintosh, I'd love to hear about it.

mpolichette• 4 years ago

I've thought about hooking into messages w/ a running mac before... Do you have a high level description of your approach? I looked in the iMessage GraphQL Server server repo for docs but didn't see anything obvious...

On a quick investigation I noticed you are reading the sqlite db... but it wasn't super clear how you send/receive messages?

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

I’m doing polling the Messages SQLite database to detect receiving new messages, and and using built in Messages scripting capabilities to send messages. See here: https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessagegraphqlserver/blob/main...

sgt• 4 years ago

Very cool

anthk5• 4 years ago

Just 10 conversations? It would be better to use an IRC client against Bitlbee.

As for the irc client, use any.

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

Certainly there’s a lot of opportunities for improvement here!

anthk5• 4 years ago

Yep. This looks a bit clunky. Any old/rusty irc client (even the ones for DOS and a 286) will connect to public bitlbee servers, where you have several. By typing up 'plugins' at its &bitlbee channel (not a typo), you will get the supported chat protocols on that server.

mikestew• 4 years ago

I’m not seeing where Bitlbee supports iMessage. Is a plug-in needed for that support?

anthk5• 4 years ago

Bitlbee supports libpurple (Pidgin) plugins. That's how I message over Telegram with sic (tiny IRC client) against Bitlbee to people using smartphones around.

dagmx• 4 years ago

You're perhaps missing the point of this.

It's clearly not meant to be something you'd use regularly. It looks like an excercise of "let me see if I can do this"

If you're arguing about practicality, then you've already missed the boat by a few decades if you're running on this ancient OS.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

classic Mac coder here -- some experiments might show.. that software development is not bad for this 25 year old system.. the user experience is calm, cool and collected IMHO. But anyone with an interest in graphics will find that even with later "faster" models of Mac, the JPEG and PNG decompression will be amazingly slow compared to modern times. That is not to say that plenty of interesting and modern software will not be useable - it is.. rather the sheer math and bit-movement involved in quick JPEG decompression might come as a shock to phone users of today. Overall, very supportive of "OS archeology" here.

anthk5• 4 years ago

M68k may be slow, but a g3 ppc will be fast enough.

grishka• 4 years ago

Also modern cryptography. I remember reading somewhere that some old computers are so slow with it that the server times out before the client has a chance to complete the key exchange algorithm.

cplusplusfellow2• 4 years ago

Does this mean we could write and iMessage client for Linux?

rblatz• 4 years ago

This has the same limitations of every other 3rd party iMessage client. It needs a companion app running on a Mac so that it can interface with iMessage running on that Mac. Basically it’s an iMessage proxy/client.

cplusplusfellow2• 4 years ago

I would love to transition to a Linux for most things but I can’t give up the ability to text via my mac desktop. It’s so much faster and I barely suffer a context switch.

Having to stop and pick up my phone to type with my thumb is just agonizing. And not everyone I deal with is on slack.

userbinator• 4 years ago

Given how long it's existed, I'm surprised no one has RE'd and written a compatible 3rd-party implementation.

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

This package would be pretty trivial to port to Linux, and you could make some pretty large improvements running on a more modern system

olliej4• 4 years ago

The problem is you still have to have a Mac to do the actual work, but then the M1 mini is fast and reasonably priced so maybe could be set up with a cross compiler so you could have it doing something else useful rather than being (despite the price as a computer being reasonable) a very expensive messaging client :)

Obviously assuming linux is your main environment so a single Mac wouldn’t have additional use otherwise. If you did also run a Mac anyway having the proxy/forwarding to any machine you were working on would be super nice (similar to text forwarding to your desktop so you don’t need to get your phone all the time)

marban• 4 years ago

I miss Classic box art.

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

Yeah! I had a lot of fun gathering up lots of other Classic box art and designing the box art for this project!

olliej4• 4 years ago

Yeah, I appreciate a lot of digital distribution but there’s something nice about the packaging of old non-game software

behnamoh• 4 years ago

Ok but why?

olliej4• 4 years ago

As with many such hobby projects it’s a “why not?”. Not every project must have some kind of serious “value”

rsync• 4 years ago

Is there a proper API for Apple imessage such that I can create imessages from the command line ?

I send SMS with 'curl' commands using my twilio credentials ...

Can I do something similar with imessage ?

RL_Quine• 4 years ago

No.

tambourine_man3• 4 years ago

Unfortunately, there's no way other than what the author used.

Not even through a third party like Twilio

anthk5• 4 years ago

For iMessage you can use Bitlbee and any IRC client.

sbr464• 4 years ago

I've seen a few random libraries/hacks/topics on GitHub. I can't say how outdated or if any are functional.

https://github.com/btroo/messaging-vis

https://github.com/topics/imessage

https://github.com/drbh/power-message

https://github.com/wtfaremyinitials/osa-imessage

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

I even have some older projects in this space:

https://github.com/CamHenlin/imessageclient

https://github.com/CamHenlin/iMessageWebClient

https://github.com/CamHenlin/iMessageModule

kaladin-jasnah• 4 years ago

Not curl, but https://github.com/open-imcore/barcelona may be of interest (I believe you might have to disable SIP and AMFI though). The Matrix-iMessage bridge uses and I find it to work quite reliably and quickly.

asdff• 4 years ago

You can write it in applescript

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11812184/how-to-send-an-...

RodgerTheGreat2• 4 years ago

An impressive proof-of-concept.

The UI elements look rather odd. What's the rationale for using a custom immediate-mode UI library instead of using the Mac's native forms and toolbox routines for them?

tambourine_man3• 4 years ago

Probably familiarity and ease of development.

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

Sure, I felt like having a simple immediate mode library would make UI programming on old Macs a lot easier. I still think that’s true after getting the UI library working and having used it for a project. I wrote a blog post explaining my reasoning here as well: https://henlin.net/2021/12/21/Introducing-Nuklear-for-Macint...

pvg2• 4 years ago

It makes a lot of sense and toolbox programming is a pain - it was quite low-level in its day too. The downside is the you end up with an app that runs on classic MacOS but doesn't look anything like a classic MacOS app. I think that's a problem somewhat inherent in the platform - the system-provided GUI programming model was primitive but users cared about the look/feel of the UI just as much if not more than now.

tambourine_man3• 4 years ago

Cameron, that's awesome, congratulations. I'd love to read about the developing process in a blog post.

Now you just need a cool icon to go with your app. You already have the box art spot on

filmgirlcw2• 4 years ago

This is awesome! I sort of want to dust off one of my old PPC Macs and try this out — tho I’d have to put MacOS 9 on it first (I think I’ve only got OS X on it). What a great/fun little project!

pcan77• 4 years ago

This is absolutely awesome, I cannot wait to install it on my mac color classic!!

camhenlin8• 4 years ago

Let me know how it goes! I’m really interested in hearing how it goes on some higher end equipment. I personally haven’t tried anything other than 68000-based systems

Show HN: Messages for Macintosh – a classic Mac iMessage client

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