Chatalog for iChat, by Freeverse

It's not often that I get excited about a new application. When one comes along that fills a critical need in my life, however, I jump for joy. Chatalog, from Freeverse, has me jumping for joy.

Chatalog indexes your iChat transcripts and enables you to store them in your default email client where all the rest of your vital correspondence is. Chatalog also creates an easy to search html library of links, images and PDFs from all your chats and provides Chat stats so you can see how your day is really being spent. Tiger users will also appreciate the included Dashboard Widget.

I conduct a lot of business over iChat. For reference purposes, I save all my chat transcripts. They are as valuable to me as email is. Links and images get passed back and forth all day long and I have more than 20,000 chat logs archived across multiple computers. When I need to find a snippet of a chat I had with someone a few weeks ago, it gets ugly. I've tried all the chat transcript searching apps out there and haven't found one that really stands out or works reliably for me. If it does what it claims to do and does it well, Chatalog has the potential to become as invaluable to me as my morning coffee.

It's $12.95 for personal use, $24.95 for business and requires iChat AV and Mac OS X 10.3 or higher. I'll be giving it a good workout today and I expect I'll be buying it if it works half as well as I think it might!