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In the case of group messages, I often encountered the same issue, as well as sometimes seeing only part of a conversation. Some cases were more extreme: In one case, there were two entries, one lasting 1 minutes while another lasted 2 weeks.Ĭhatology can be used to view group conversations, but it only shows you the name of one participant and sometimes doesn’t show the whole conversation. For example, a conversation with one of my cousins on Decemshowed two entries, both for 5:15 p.m.-one lasted 29 minutes, while another lasted just one minute. And because Chatology pulls from these archives to provide search results, it too will often show multiple results for the same conversation. You can view them in the Finder at ~/Library/Messages/Archive in many cases, you’ll see duplicates of the same conversation, or excerpts of a larger part of the conversation. Making the experience more problematic is the fact that Messages’s logs are a bit of a mess. In a concession to that, at least Chatology does display the number of images or links in a conversation next to the respective filtering option.
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If you filter by images or links, you’ll often end up with multiple conversations that don’t have those types instead, Chatology will report “There are no images in this conversation.” I’d rather instead that conversations that don’t match simply not be shown. For example, sifting through search results can be a pain: As in Messages, you still need to click on each individual person to see the responses Chatology adds an extra layer by then requiring you to select each conversation in turn. While all of that can be helpful, I found myself wishing for more. 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.
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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. Select any of them and you’ll see only that type of information, letting you quickly browse images or links in that conversations. In the rightmost pane, you can choose to filter by three types of data: conversation (text), images, and links. 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.Ĭhatology lets you quickly and easily filter conversations by contact, though some contacts may appear more than once. Select a person and you’ll see a list of dates when you conversed with them. The leftmost pane breaks down your conversations by people (group chats are broken into a separate section). While those are quick and handy filters, it would be nice if Chatology also let you specify a more abstract range. A 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 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. 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.
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