![]() It searches all of the chat logs on your computer with incredible speed. Even though Chatology searches through them all with no problem, narrowing down the results to the exact message you need can take some time because there’s no way to separate chat logs by the chat service that created them (this is OS X’s fault, not Chatology’s, however). That’s a lot of conversations to go through. In my case, all of my App.net private messages, AIM conversations, and iMessages were imported. Because Chatology stores all of your logs from the Messages app, all of your AIM or Yahoo! messages are also logged, along with those from any services you might use, such as the Amy plugin. If you just want to read a series of messages from yesterday or a few days ago, you’re probably better off scrolling backwards in the Messages app.ĭue to the way Chatology separates logs by date, if you don’t know the exact date of the message you’re looking for, it can quickly become a pain to find what you need.Īnother factor that can cause some trouble searching Chatology is the sheer number of messages that it stores. For starters, the design of Chatology makes it somewhat impractical for anything other than searching. Now that we know what Chatology does, let’s address how well it does that. This feature is very handy if you frequently search your messages but prefer Chatology’s search interface over Apple’s. When this option is enabled, pressing Command-F in the Messages app brings up Chatology instead of the usual Messages search bar. ![]() Chatology also provides some extra search parameters, making it easy to find links or images in a conversation.Ĭhatology also has the ability to integrate with Messages. Upon first run, Chatology imports all of these messages (tens of thousands in my case, and probably more for many other users) and catalogs them so that you can easily search them. It’s these chat logs that Chatology reads. If you delete those files (or disable saving them), your Messages app won’t be able to store the seemingly infinite chat history that you normally see. These chat logs are then used to keep track of threads and conversations in the Messages app. Messages for Mac saves every conversation you have to a file on your hard drive by default. In short, Chatology is a chat log viewer. You still have to use the Messages app to send or receive iMessages and IMs on other platforms. However, it doesn’t actually feature any messaging capability. Chatology is a separate app, not a plugin. The real answer is somewhere in between those two. ![]() Others hypothesized that it would be some kind of tweak or plugin for Messages that solved the search problem right in the same app. ![]() One major difference between Messages and Chatology’s respective search features: While the former will find a string even if its inside a word (for example, searching for “in” will return results with the word “think” and anything else that contains “in”), Chatology searches for the term as a whole word.The biggest question that most people had when Chatology was first teased was simple: what does the app actually do? Some assumed that it would be a full-blown messaging suite with improved search features. The latter usually, though not always, provides better results.Ĭhatology’s major attempt to improve on Messages’s searching is its ability to filter search results. While those are quick and handy filters, it would be nice if Chatology also let you specify a more abstract range.Ī bar on the top of the window lets you choose from certain time windows, including all messages, only messages sent today, those sent in the last 30 days, or those sent in the last year. The leftmost pane breaks down your conversations by people (group chats are broken into a separate section). Select a person and you’ll see a list of dates when you conversed with them. One downside here is that Chatology doesn’t do as good a job as Messages does of grouping the same contact if you converse with someone both via their phone number and their email address, they’ll appear as two separate contacts. Chatology lets you quickly and easily filter conversations by contact, though some contacts may appear more than once. In the rightmost pane, you can choose to filter by three types of data: conversation (text), images, and links. Select any of them and you’ll see only that type of information, letting you quickly browse images or links in that conversations. Images are shown inline-you can even Quick Look them by using the button in the toolbar or by selecting them and hitting the spacebar. ![]() In the case of both links and images, you can click an arrow icon to be taken to their location in the conversation at large. While all of that can be helpful, I found myself wishing for more. ![]()
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