[Pyobjc-dev] Using PyObjC to reverse engineer iChat's NSArchiver'ed "recent chats" files

[Bob I. <bo...@re...>]

It was kind of bugging me that iChat's chat saving features are only 
slightly better than worthless (they're frigging NSArchiver'ed, and 
iChat offers no searching facilities whatsoever.. as far as I can tell).

I used class-dump to reverse-guessgineer how these things were coded, 
and here's some PyObjC sample code that seems to work.

I also tried hacking into their PrivateFramework (trying to force their 
classes to do the deserialization) to get more information about the 
Presentity (buddyPicture, etc), but it behaves quite strangely and 
demands stuff to be setup beforehand.  Without tapping Apple's 
InstantMessage PrivateFramework (and the iChatAgent, quite possibly), 
the uniqueId+Service of a SavedChat Presentity could probably be merged 
with more info from Address Book, but I haven't tried.

-bob