[Adium-devl] Moving chat transcripts to ~/Documents/Adium

[Peter Hosey]

On Apr 28, 2009, at 09:05:38, David Clark wrote:
> I think it is true to say that most users feel free to move items  
> within ~/Documents as they see fit. I certainly have my own  
> organization scheme in there, and I assume that anything in there is  
> mine to move as I want. That could lead to unpleasant situations in  
> which users move around their Adium logs, "losing" them in the eyes  
> of the log viewer, and causing the users all kinds of problems.

Here's an interesting alternative: What if we just used Spotlight? Any  
log files within the user's home directory are automatically there in  
the Transcript Viewer.

As for where we save them, we could create the ~/Documents/Adium\  
Transcripts folder and then save an alias to it in the prefs. If the  
user moves it, the alias will hold up and we'll be saving new  
transcripts in the correct (new) location*. Meanwhile, our Spotlight- 
based transcript detection will find existing transcripts anywhere in  
the user's home directory, even if the alias breaks for some reason.

This also neatly solves the problem of “how do I get my recently- 
restored-from-backup transcripts back into Adium?”. They're already  
there.

*We should probably include this folder as a second place to search  
for transcripts—think set-union. If it's in the Home directory, no  
difference. If it's outside the Home directory, the user will want us  
to show the transcripts that we've created in their outside-of-Home  
transcripts folder.