cocoaforge

I think this would be pretty easy to do for you guys:
When looking for a conversation in Spotlight, let the adium log to be opened into Adium (and not Safari), and possibly displayed as a "Conversation" and not as a Document?

a log is an .html file, if youd like adium to be your default handler of html, which i cannot honest suggest you do, then a log will open in adium

Wow thanks !!!

Well, I guess you can set the default opener for a single file, and not for the file type...

djbsquared wrote:a log is an .html file, if youd like adium to be your default handler of html, which i cannot honest suggest you do, then a log will open in adium

True, but how hard would it be for the devs to change the log's extension from .html to, say, .adm and set Adium to be the default opener?

Hmmm... I do not like very much the concept of creating a new file type as a make-up of a true html file. The whole concept of extension is (according to John Siracusa from ArsTechnica and many people) very confusing, not user friendly and not really extensible. The format of a file and the type of the file should be two different things imho.

This "extension as data type" thing is violated ALL the time, especially with XML (including XHTML) data. Just look at .plists, they're really just XML data, but with the file extension .plist.

I fear that we're gonna have a nightmare trying to make Adium play nice with Spotlight, especially with updating old logs...

lostchicken wrote:This "extension as data type" thing is violated ALL the time, especially with XML (including XHTML) data. Just look at .plists, they're really just XML data, but with the file extension .plist.

I fear that we're gonna have a nightmare trying to make Adium play nice with Spotlight, especially with updating old logs...

Actually, the point of XML is to allow for new formats to be created, so "plist" really is a file format (defined by the plist dtd).

We've been discussing what to do about this problem on IRC. http://trac.adiumx.com/ticket/88 references the issue. Another thing that would be nice is to unify logging with chat history.

Yep, my request is actually simplier, and would be just a little step forward. I just would like the logs to be opened in Adium by default (with minimal changes). Maybe it's just NOT possible.

But I really look forward having Adium to use metadata, as I hope any app will do so soon

Thanks to the devs.

the good thing with .html is that i can for example send the log to a pc user so he can view it since he wouldnt have adium.

Ok I don't know much about this stuff so I am probably wrong. But spotlight looks at meta data. I don't know how sophisticated spotlight plugins are, but can you tell spotlight "any html file with xyz in their meta data belongs in a different category"? I assume their is something in the meta data of the log files that says it's an adium log. Am I talking crazy talk?

The main request for meta data would be the alias. So if you Spotlight a person, "John Smith" you'd get the Adium chats with them even if the name wasn't mentioned in the text of the conversation.

Out of curiosity, how is apple handling ichat logs?

They show up in the generic "Documents" category, with what appears to be no specific iChat metadata.

They show up in generic documents in the format "[First Name] [Last Name] on 2005-05-10 at 16.24.chat"

There doesn't seem to be meta data for the s/n so a search of the screen name won't bring up the chat unless it was mentioned in the conversation.

(hopefully Adium logs will have both so you can do a search of either)

Its good that the chat logs work in spotlight. I like being able to get information from previous conversations by searching terms within it etc etc. How about having Adium contacts appear in spotlight as well? As well as the ability to right click on a contact and spotlight that contact?

In the Ars Technica report I read about the UTIs (unified type identifier). Shouldn't it be possible to create new UTI for Adium logs, but keep the .html extension. The UTI could inherit from the generic html-UTI but such files should open with Adium log viewer and not with safari.
After that it should be "easy" to create a spotlight plugin just for adium log files.

If you could do what's mentioned above, that would be awesomely great (not because I would use it the feature *that* much, but still I would love it).

Oh. And if you could do a special icon for log files too... Ok, I'm exagerating

chouchou: If log files got their own type (which does seem to be a good way of approaching it), then adding an icon would basically just be a matter of making an icon. They'd also open in Adium on doubleclick.

troplin: I'm not entirely sure how to assign a UTI to a file, actually. I think it may just be derived from other type identification info (extension, type/creator codes, etc...), but I could be wrong.

then adding an icon would basically just be a matter of making an icon.

I do know that, but who am I to ask you to do it, considering it's definitely not something everyone needs?

As the icon designer, I can tell you a document icon is not a big deal.