charactr

iPhone/iMessage users can interactively visualize their texting history, using pandas, d3.js and crossfilter.js.

You must have a mac with either iMessage or itunes backups of your iphone.

Instructions from command line:

• git clone git@github.com:sshleifer/charactr.git
• cd charactr
• export PYTHONPATH=PYTHONPATH:"."
• python app/run.py
• If that failed, try pip install -r requirements.txt

The data are read from ~/Library/Messages/chat.db (and some other paths) by the read_db() function in chat_to_csv.py Cleaned data are written to imsg_stats/csv/ Then some javascript runs that looks for the cleaned data and makes some pretty visualizations Help and feature requests welcome and sorely needed!

Desktop app (broken, help fix!)

1. Download charactr [Here] (http://pjdewire.github.io/charactr_site/).
2. Right click and open on the charactr application.
3. This should open localhost:8000 in your browser, with the scatterplot showing. If you have a previous version or another application running on port 8000, you will need to kill the other application and refresh.
4. Once you see the scatterplot, read the instructions.
5. Follow links to charts 2 and 3.
6. When you are bored, force quit charactr.

If something breaks, take a screenshot of your Mac and/or browser console, and post it as an issue or email to sshleifer at gmail dot com.

Saving Your Data (without viewing charts)

• python scripts/save_data.py
• data will be written to imsg_stats/msg.csv

Privacy

• we dont have a server. No data leaves your local machine!

Future Plans

• Delete unused code
• Support Group Chats
• More Plots, tables
• NLP, word clouds