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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…

I ran into a strange issue on my MacBook Pro today. Turns out if you use the USB port closest to the LCD (left side of the MBP) audio tends to “skip”. Use the USB port that is furthest from the LCD (right side) and the audio works great.

Same thing goes for MacBooks, but they are both on the same side. Any USB audio device (headphones, external sound cards) should be plugged into the USB port furthest from the LCD.

Here’s the discussion on Apple’s site

I’ll start off with a quick explanation of my set up, then what the problem is, and finally the obvious solution.

I have 2 computers. One is a 15″ Macbook Pro which I recently purchased to replace an iBook G4. My other computer is a desktop Windows box that I used to do all my gaming on. I’ve mostly grown out of that, so I’ve been cannibalizing it slowly and using it as a file server.

Since my laptop only has 160GB hard drive (for now) and I have a lot of music, I have most of it on my desktop and stream it through iTunes to my laptop. This is where the problem lies. I always put my laptop to sleep when I’m not using it because I hate unnecessarily using power. The less I use, the more Hydro can sell to the Americans, which means more money for the Canadian economy, and ultimately less power that has to come from coal. Ever time I close my laptop though, iTunes disconnects from the share on my desktop. I come back a few hours later, maybe just want to listen to a track or 2 while I get ready to go out, but iTunes has to reconnect and (I assume) download the entire library all over again. For a library of my size, we’re looking at 30 seconds or more. Why?

Here’s what I’m wondering. I know that iTunes stores it’s library locally in an XML file. I assume that in the background all iTunes is doing is serving up a stripped down version of that XML file to tell the client iTunes what tracks are shared. My library, and I’m sure most peoples, does not change all that often, at least not daily. So why can’t iTunes cache and only redownload it if it’s recently been changed? It seems so simple to me, so much so that I figure there has to be a much more technical reason as to why that isn’t possible. It’s as simple as storing a lastModified field in XML and having the server send that over first.

Is it because it takes too long to make the initial connection? Maybe that’s what’s taking so much time and not the transfer of the track list. I’m not sure, but I feel that there must be a solution, and I feel that Apple should be all over it seeing as their primary market is Laptops and a two computer model (a la Air).

Though, I don’t know what about.

My friend felt that he needed to update his blog a few days ago. I told him to go home, drink some absinthe and then ramble. While I don’t have absinthe, I can still ramble. If only it would turn out as hilarious.

Apple released Safari 3.1 today. What I’m most excited about is the addition of the client side DB from the HTML 5 spec. Of course in typical Apple fashion it’s SQLite based. Microsoft has recently added the same storage to the IE8 beta, and Mozilla has had a (somewhat limited) implementation since Firefox 2.

What does this mean? More fast loading web apps like Gmail. Offline access to content that will (hopefully) seamlessly update any changes as soon as you get connected again. Also it will provide much more storage then the aging cookies have offered.

The main reason I’m looking forward to more apps supporting this is for my iPhone. The 2.0 software will have the same WebKit updates that Safari 3.1 has, including this client side DB. Being in Canada, I’m tethered to high data rates and sketchy networks. I do not pay for a data plan. While wireless is semi-ubiquitous, open networks aren’t always available. This is prime time for a client side DB. If I suddenly need access to the directions to a meeting that are in my inbox, what better way then pull up gmail (because lets face it, Mobile Mail is far from perfect) and have all my old messages ready for me, no reloading, no network.

And that kids, is what gets me excited.

got up on stage and screamed “developers” to spite Windows Mobile.

And done something else to take RIM down a notch… wait, he did.