Yojimbo tip: Searchable iChat transcripts
Yojimbo, the new(ish) Information manager from Bare Bones has a mailing list 
. It’s not very active. I’ve only seen two emails from it in two weeks.
One of those emails was the kind of tip that you never think of yourself, but which seems so obvious when someone else describes it.
At the end of an iChat session, if you select the Print dialog in iChat and choose, “Save PDF in Yojimbo” you will get a nice PDF of the chat in Yojimbo, the texts of which is fully searchable. Nifty!
[Nice tip, Ted.]
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Tags: Apple Mail Tips, chats, iChat, pdf, Productivity, transcripts, yojimbo
April 13th, 2006 at 12:31 am
Of course, if you choose the option to save chat transcripts, Spotlight searches them easily.
I used to use a (still very good) tool called Logorrhea in the pre-Spotlight days.
April 13th, 2006 at 12:36 am
Sure. But if all your information is in Yojimbo, then it is good to have important chats in there too.
Yojimbo’s search is a lot faster than Spotlight. For me anyway.
April 13th, 2006 at 10:10 am
I preferred ChatMaster over Logorrhea until it stopped working with newer versions of iChat AV. Since then I’ve been satisfied collecting iChat transcripts in a DEVONthink Pro group using a synchronize script that scans ~/Documents/iChats whenever the DTP group is accessed. Otherwise, I might have paid $10 for Unsanity’s iChat Transcript Manager.
Analogous to the Yojimbo tip, it’s possible to save iChat transcripts as PDFs in DEVONthink (Pro) using its “Save to DEVONthink (Pro)” PDF service from the Print dialog.
Kent Sutherland’s excellent Chax iChat plug-in (InputManager) has a simple built-in log viewer.
April 13th, 2006 at 11:47 pm
SJK, Thanks for this tips and pointers. I’ll be hunting them up.
April 14th, 2006 at 7:39 am
The two features that most convinced me to install Chax are tabbed message windows and custom fonts in the contacts list. In the next version (still beta) I might enable Growl notifications and disable growliChat (which I like, but has more features than I’ll ever use).