jessedyck.com

via flickr.

… and Google comes up 5th.

On the second page.

search.live.com is number 1.

I was there a little over a year ago. Beautiful building, too bad it’s gone. I took the picture below.

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/04/05/qc-city-fire.html

Adium, the multi-protocol IM client for OS X, has a problem. That problems is groups. It has a horrible lack of a GUI when it comes to managing contact list groups. The biggest thing that has bugged me lately has been how it sorts my groups. I like to have my close contacts group at the top of my list, and my group of people I don’t talk to at the bottom. Adium however, seems to have it’s own idea of how it will order my groups. Here’s what I did to fix it.

Adium stores it’s information for every item in your contact list in a plist located at ~/Library/Application Support/Adium 2.0/Users/Default/ByObject/. Navigate to that folder in Finder and you will see a bunch of .plists. These files are ordered by protocol, and named as such (’AIM.*’, ‘GTALK.*’, ‘MSN.*’, etc). You will also see the ‘Group.*’ files. This is where Adium stores it’s information on Groups.

Being that these are .plist files, you will need a plist editor installed to make changes. I have XCode installed, which comes with Property List Editor, but there are also some other plist editors out there. This is also a great opportunity to use Leopard’s Quick View, which will display the plist in XML. Looking at one of the ‘Group.*’ files you will see a property called Order Index, this is how Adium determines what order to display your groups in your contact list. This is the golden value. Change it to whatever you’d like (0 being the top of the list, 1 would be the second from the top), save the plist and relaunch Adium. Be careful not to have duplicate Order Index values, though I’m sure Adium would handle it gracefully, it’s still something you’d want to stay away from.

Update: As indicated in the Comments, I’m lazy and didn’t actually do very much research into this beforehand. It appears that when your Contact List is in Windowed mode, it is as simple as click and drag to re-order your groups. When your list is in Borderless Window mode, you only need to hold Command while dragging.

And what did we learn today kids? Google is your best friend! Even though we already knew that…