vaporwarez :: two mac apps i need

my brain's been pressure cooking the next two app ideas for the past week or so. since i don't have the programming prowess to pull either off, i'm spooling them out here hoping someone will.

ichat log combiner like sean i spend a lot of time in my im client. i almost use it more than i do email. thanks to logorrhea i can easily search my ichat logs for conversations. still, i'm anal retentive about hard drive clutter. you see, ichat writes a log file every time you close the window. after talking to someone on and off over the course of the day, i can amass five or six seperate log files.

now maybe i'm used to trillian keeping a single log file for each user you chat with - in plain text nonetheless. perhaps i've been spoiled, but seing over 300 log files for conversations that have occuried between my girlfriend and i drives me batshit. if i knew a bit of applescript, i'd write an app that combines the ichat log files for each user i chat with based on the date i chatted with them. so puck on 2004-05-24 at 01.34.chat, puck on 2004-05-24 at 14.26.chat and puck on 2004-05-24 at 23.28.chat would combine to become puck on 2004-05-24.chat. y'know like voltron, but with chat files. it'd be even cooler if i could feed it an option to strip the rich text formatting and output combined logfiles like trillian.

menu bar condenser it would seem that the menu bar on my ibook is getting full.

from l-r: instiki, desktop manager, plazes, dial-up, airport, battery, clock

i'd turn some of those off, but i use each one too much to just up and remove them. windows xp has the right idea by allowing users to hide certain tray icons [by putting them under a collapsable menu], so it'd be nice if someone could hack the same functionality into the menubar. just sayin'.