Cocoa, Lemons and Geeks

Greetings from Amsterdam. I'm here for the second day of CocoaDevHouse! About 20 geeks have been camping out in the Post C.S. building to gather, discuss, develop and generally have fun.

I've mainly come to work on my first Cocoa app (LemonJuice) and benefit from the expertise of people who actually know the API ;). I've gone from "typing a bunch of random crap" to "doing cool stuff with ridiculously small amounts of code". Cocoa is definitely interesting, and far more powerful than the Windows API I've used for a couple of years.

More details inside...

The application I've been coding is essentially, a WebKit based Terminal. I dislike the fact that a typical bash session in a GUI terminal is not a very consistent experience. For example, bash does not understand the normal home/end keys. And because you're not typing in a normal textbox, you can't select text by holding shift, have spell checking, and non-destructive autocompletion. What's also important to me is that the typical shell command now outputs a very ugly, very UNIXy stream of text. Whereas usually, that information is quite structured (a list of files, a list of key/value pairs, a timestamp, a media file, ...). Files and hyperlinks should be clickable. Tables should be sortable. Etc. etc.

So, I want to use WebKit (the engine behind Safari) to make a Terminal that outputs nicey styled HTML. A directory listing would emerge as a nicely formatted table with icons, for example. But you could just as well pipe that list into another application, without losing the structure (sort of what Microsoft's Monad is supposed to be like).

Of course, I have no clue if I can build such a thing. I'm essentially going blind now, coding until I have a good prototype ;). So far I've got "cd", "ls" and "quit" working. Still, most of the work now has been trying to figure out how I can achieve things in a way that is Cocoa-ish and clean. At least I'm having fun...

Current prototype: