After a good four hours of reading and writing code that made no sense at all, I ended up dividing the original MacTime dates by 1,000,000,000 to convert them to seconds. Long story short: Apparently, Apple uses Mac Absolute Time (MacTime) which represents nanoseconds since instead of other types of dates which are Unix based off of seconds since. You can find the articles that helped me solve this here, here, here, and here. I had to go over a fair amount of blogs, articles, and softwares’ documentation to come up with an easy way of formatting the Date column. I would say this was what took the longest. As you may notice, the dates aren’t in a human readable format. text includes all the messages that were exchanged - yes, that’s Spanish -, is_from_me indicates whether I (1) or the other person (0) sent the message, and Date gives information on when the message was sent. Wow! That’s a preview of the first four rows of the dataframe. But it came to my mind that if I eventually managed to combine some of my Python and Data Warehousing skills I would be able to come up with some sort of analysis of our conversations on iMessage. I flip-flopped between designing something for him in Illustrator and running to the closest bookstore and get the first book I saw. Why am I telling you this? My best friend turned a quarter of a century old in December and I felt I should give him a birthday present - but I didn’t know what exactly. If you come with a bag of Haribo’s mind-blowing Goldbären or a good chocolate, I’ll be walking on air. I sometimes feel like I don’t need it or it just adds to the clutter… But I ain’t no stupid girl. Another thing I dislike is receiving presents. For the record, this doesn’t mean I don’t like/love you. It doesn’t matter if it’s Christmas, your birthday, or if you just had a baby I just won’t get anything for you. I’ve always been the type of person who doesn’t like making presents. Before I get to the coding part, here’s a short background story about how I ended up trying to master the messy art of analyzing a conversation on iMessage using Python…

Imessage extract software