Logorrhea - Browse and search iChat log files

Nov 03, '03 10:35:00AM

Contributed by: robg

Logorrhea imageThe macosxhints Rating:
8 of 10
[Score: 8 out of 10]

With family and friends spread across the globe, I spend a fair bit of time in iChat. Early on, I enabled logging of iChat sessions so I could later find those tidbits that always seem to go drifting by in conversation. What I quickly discovered, though, is that there's no Apple-provided means of searching and browsing iChat logs -- you have to open each one as a separate iChat, and then just page through it. That means that in order to find some historical tidbit, you not only have to remember who your were talking to, but what day you were talking to them! With over 200 iChat logs per user, there was no way I could find anything in my logs.

Enter Logorrhea. Using a simple two-tab (Browse and Search) interface, Logorrhea makes finding things in iChat logs a much simpler proposition. The Browse tab shows all your chat logs in a vertically split mode -- participants on the left, log date and time on the right. Click a person's name on the left, and the right displays their logged iChats. The bottom of the window displays a scrollable preview window so you can browse conversations with ease.

The Search tab has a data input section, a results pane, and a browse pane. Enter your search term(s) and hit Find. The results pane shows any logs that contain the search terms, displaying the buddy's name and the date/time of the chat. Click any entry in the results pane, and the browser area pops up the chat with the search terms highlighted in yellow. After trying it for the first time, there's no going back to manually searching iChat logs!

Why only 8 out of 10? There are two improvements which could make Logorrhea truly powerful. The first is a simple change -- in the Results pane, autmoatically scroll the log to the first occurence of the highlighted search term (you have to scroll by hand right now, and watch for the yellow highlight). Then give us a "Find Next" button that would jump to the next occurence. The second request is much tougher, but it would greatly increase the power of Logorrhea -- I'd love an "advanced" search mode that allowed boolean finds -- "Father and not in-law" for example. But even lacking these final touches, Logorrhea is indispensible to me for its ability to easily manage a large number of iChat log files.

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Mac OS X Hints
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