Sadly, I am not ready to announce the release of the next major version of Consolation, my free log browser, but invite your suggestions for changes and improvements.

I am honoured to say that Consolation has been mentioned by Dave Hamilton and John F Braun on The Mac Observer’s Mac Geek Gab podcast, in issue 654. You can listen to that show here, or subscribe to it in iTunes.

If you’re interested in Macs and/or iOS devices, Mac Geek Gab sounds informative and authoritative, and well worth listening to.

Consolation 3

Before Consolation was LogLogger, a quick AppleScript hack which did the job that I needed rather clumsily. Consolation 1 moved to the much improved user interface available with Swift, although its function was still quite basic.

Currently, Consolation 2 does most of the things that I need it to, through its rather dull but highly functional interface. The only problem which I notice now is that, with longer periods of log analysis, it does result in a spinning beachball, although that is the result of the time taken by the underlying command, not the app itself.

There are two changes which I am thinking about investigating: one is to put the running of the log show command into a background task, which will not speed anything up, but which should eliminate the spinning beachball which appears when performing a long search of the log. I don’t see any user benefit beyond that, though.

The other is to replace the current system of popup menus and text boxes used to set the search criteria with one based on the standard NSPredicateEditor, as shown in basic form below.

This conforms more to other apps, like Console, and allows you to have more than two terms in the search. So my first question is whether any Consolation user is currently finding the two search terms in Consolation 2 too few, and would usefully use three or more? If so, would an NSPredicateEditor control be an improvement?

If you have any other suggestions for changes that you would like to see in Consolation 3, please add them here as comments. I hope to start work on this new version in the next couple of weeks.