What is it? In a nutshell, it is an application that will scan your iChat and Adium chat transcripts, store them all in its own database and then allow you to browse and search them in a snap.
How is that different from Spotlight, you might ask? The answer is simple: Spotlight searches for text, while Chat Transcript Manager allows you to narrow your search by time interval, chat contents, and participants, not to mention the plain vanilla old style text search.
The chat contents criteria is something I find very useful. Often, I get sent a link to some site (usually it's either these silly russian jokes from my Russian friends or the weird pictures from our own Rosyna), and then a few days later when I want to re-visit or bounce it to someone else, I can't remember it. What's worse, I can't even remember what we talked about when the link was sent to me, or what the site name was. So the text search won't work in this case. This is where Chat Transcript Manager comes handy. I simply launch it from the iChat with Cmd+0 (CTM has a nice little option that lets you add a shortcut to it right into iChat's/Adium's Window menu), then select the range (This Week usually works fine for me) and "Links" as the Chat Contents criteria. Voila, I have all chats with the links in them available. Then it's a matter of finding the chat I need and hitting Next button on the toolbar, that will jet me right to the link. Useful.
And of course, Chat Transcript Manager comes with everything you'd expect from a well-behaved Mac application: it will update your chats live if you keep it open, it has awesome chat display styles to choose from (thanks to the great designers who allowed us to use their designs -- Matthew Bice and Peter Simonsson), and much more.
The price. You can try it with no features removed for 15 days or 30 launches, whatever comes last. We realize the product like Chat Transcript Manager may not be needed every day, so if you use it infrequently you still have a chance to fully try it out. Then, if you like it (and we really hope you do ;), you can purchase it for $10 (this is an introductory price that will last for a month, then it jumps to twice as much, so if you like it, make sure you grab the opportunity to get it cheap!).
And this is just the beginning of the road. There are many exciting big and small things we want to implement in Chat Transcript Manager, and your feedback will help us in deciding the priorities, as usual. We will expand the list of supported log formats, so make sure to let us know your favorite chat application (other than iChat and Adium X, that is).
Overall, try it out, and see for yourself. Here's the direct download like (1.2 M): http://www.unsanity.net/ctm-10.dmg.
Looking forward to your feedback!
Posted by slava at 08:22 AM
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Excellent idea to create a chat log manager! I've been looking forward for an app like this for some time.
I must admit though, that CTM somewhat disappoints me. Firstly, it is very slow: it imports about 2 chat logs per second. This is even worse than Adium.
The interface is somewhat odd. I can't help it, but it feels very nonstandard, almost "fake".
There seems to be a memory leak in there... my memory usage went through the roof two times already, forcing me to do a hard reboot. Ouch! It's gone up about 160 MB since I started writing this comment...
Posted by: Denis Defreyne on November 16, 2005 9:44 AMWould it be possible to get some screenshots put up on the product page?
Thanks
-RS
Chatalog is better.
http://www.freeverse.com/chatalog/
This looks excellent! Any plans to support MSN Messenger? We use it at my company with Microsoft's Live Communication Server for corporate IM, so being able to search all those chats as well would be awesome.
I hope Chat Transcript Manager will be able to sort and record text from every application used; an absolute backup.
Posted by: Saint on November 16, 2005 9:31 PMhey unsanity peeps.
CTM is very cool. i have had none of the problems others are complaining about; on 12" powerbook 867mhz, my ~1500 ichats imported in about a minute.
having a quick look at activity monitor's memory usage stats apparently CTM is using 25MB real memory. which all seems fine to me!
i'm sure you're working on it; adding support for Microsoft Messenger chats would make this app killer for me (esp. since spotlight doesn't index them).
thanks for making these great apps.
alex.
Posted by: alex kent on November 17, 2005 3:47 AMWOW! I turned down CTM the beta as I thought it was solely for iChat and I use Adium. As usual the quality of this application is high and I love the GUI, icon, and installer window...very professional, very Mac. For a first-run I am impressed.
Posted by: CREB on November 17, 2005 7:36 AMDear Mr. Bucket,
I think it quite tasteless that you reference another Developer in a similar application (although I too enjoy that Developer's applications) as we are guests here at this blog and should act accordingly.
Posted by: CREB on November 17, 2005 1:59 PMWell lets see, I've got 500 logs from the official AIM client I want to be able to read normally.
Colloquy log reading would be nice as well.
Can I get priority because I'm a paying customer? ;-)
Posted by: Nick Peshek on November 21, 2005 11:50 PMX-Chat Aqua would be nice, as well as importing these old gaim and irssi logs I have lying around
Posted by: James Brinkerhoff on November 23, 2005 8:10 AMJust to clarify my ICQ log comment above.. I don't need a "live update" for these.. Just a way to import my old chat-logs.. Oh, by the way.. I also have some Icy Juice logs.. *g*
I also would like to have some more choice for the "Chat Date" field. The last 7 oder 14 days would be nice. Another thing is your choice of the beginning of the week. I always think of monday as the beginning of the new week - but this is not so important since I will probably always use the above "last 7/14 days".
Posted by: joel on November 24, 2005 12:51 PMMSN messenger uses some sort of standard XML and it should be easy to support.
Fire uses a standard format too.
I cannot see all my chat-logs. It seems like it just imports my chats back to once in July... (which of course make the AdiumX transcript viewer much better). But if it was just fixed I would love the app.
Posted by: on November 10, 2006 11:01 AMKeep comments on topic. If a comment is unrelated to this post, it may be removed or moderated.