But that’s the problem: when it works.įor all the people who can attest their usage of Messages for Mac has never lead to issues or frustrations, there are thousands of users who, like me and my fellow MacStories teammates, have been struggling to cope with Messages’ problems and discrepancies over the past year. I have tried various messaging services in the past year, and – when it works – Apple’s iMessage through Messages for Mac is a pleasant, Mac-like experience. In my opinion, Messages for Mac gets several things right: for instance, iMessage is one of the few modern messaging services to offer a fully native Mac app, which is reflected in the way Messages supports features like Quick Look for inline attachments, Finder integration for drag & drop, or contact matching with the Contacts app. Today, with the release of Chatology, Flexibits aims at supercharging a tough and infamous subject: Messages for Mac.įirst released as a beta for OS X Lion users last year and then bundled into Mountain Lion as an app comprising the AIM and iMessage protocols, Messages has long been criticized for its technical flaws, instability, and poor performance with group threads and search. With the Fantastical brand, Flexibits has established itself as capable of building apps that use existing Apple technologies to create new, enjoyable experiences that are equally efficient, reliable, and rich in detail. Last November, they brought everything they had learned on the Mac to the iPhone with the release of Fantastical for iOS, a fantastic Calendar replacement with native iOS integration, a gorgeous Day Ticker interface, and advanced features such as a URL scheme and multiple alarms. Fantastical is the only calendar interface that I interact with on my Mac, as it can send events to configured accounts directly – in the background – without needing Apple’s Calendar. With Fantastical for Mac, released almost two years ago, they removed friction from event creation on OS X through a simple yet powerful menubar app that leveraged natural language processing. I only couldn’t buy it because the Store wasn’t available during the beta.įlexibits, run by Michael Simmons and Kent Sutherland, makes two of my favorite apps. Just type in “movie” in the Chatology search box, and it show you all the people who have messages – ever – with the word ‘movie’ in the text message, sorted by person and date, and when you click on a give message it highlights the search term for you!Ĭhatology offers a free 10-day trial, and it’s only $19.Chatology’s main window. Let’s say a friend of yours told you about a movie they really enjoyed, but you can’t remember who it was, or what the name of the movie is. You can scroll through them if you like, but by far the most powerful feature of this program is that you can search your messages easily. There is an awesome program that we recently used called Chatology.Ĭhatology loads all of your archived messages into its own interface, with the name of each person on the left, and all of the messages between you and that person, sorted by date, on the right. Now, if all of this is too complicated, too time consuming, or just too darned annoying, read about this second method! Method #2 for Finding and Searching iChat and iMessage Messages on a Mac You do that under your Mac’s Preferences > Spotlight settings. If you do not already have Spotlight indexing your messages, you may want to turn that on (or, you may not.read on). At this point you can do a search for a text string within your message archives if you have Spotlight indexing your messages. ichat files, even though iChat itself was retired by Apple back in 2012. The first thing you will probably notice is that you have a lot of messages archived, going back to when you first started using iChat or Messages (or, at least, when you first set the preferences to have your messages saved).Ĭlick on any date folder within the Messages archives, and you will see something like this:Ĭuriously, Macs still saves the messages as. Paste the above location into the window that popped up, and hit the ‘Go’ button, and it will take you right to it. If you don’t want to have to go to each subfolder individually, you can open Finder, select Go from the menu, and paste the above location into the Finder > Go and click on ‘Go to folder’ down at the bottom of the Go menu. ~/Library/Containers//Data/Library/Messages/Archive So, first things first: here is where your Messages messages are now stored: So let’s assume that you have been saving your messages, and now you want to know where to find them, and they are no longer in ~Library/Messages Your tips via CashApp, Venmo, or Paypal are appreciated! Receipts will come from ISIPP. The Internet Patrol is completely free, and reader-supported.
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