Graham English

When I read that you could use Quicksilver with Twitter, I felt as excited as Jack Bauer in an interrogation room full of terror suspects. It all started with Twitter Fan Wiki. And then I lost myself in hours of troubleshooting as I tried to force hack after hack to work the way I wanted them to. As these things are, it wasn’t nearly as hard in the end as all the work that led up to the final result.

The first AppleScript I found for the job was here. But as best as I can tell, the Keychain Access was a major bottleneck. Then I found an option that uses the Twitter Rubygem, but you’ve got to be pretty serious to install Rubygems on your Mac. I couldn’t make it happen. I’m not that serious. Then I found another way to avoid Keychain scripting, but it was still too geeky for me to get working with my limited know-how. I even found iChat support and word count with Growl notification.

I was about to give up. But I said I would give myself the length of the entire Purple Rain album to make it happen. (I hadn’t listened to it in a long time and it was my favorite album as a dirty minded pubescent teen. He said “masturbating!”) About an hour of pop/funk later, this is what I had hacked together.

Features:

• Counts characters and notifies you by Growl if you exceed 140.
• Notifies you by Growl when your tweet is sent.
• Twitter username/password is hard coded to avoid Keychain Access and reduce delays.
• Checks to see if iChat is running and then sets your status message as the current tweet.
• Checks to see if Skype is running and then sets your mood text message as the current tweet. Note: If you want to integrate Skype mood text updates, open the script in Script Editor and uncomment (remove “–”) the Skype tell.
• Growl will use the icon of Twitterific if installed.
• Need to manage multiple Twitter accounts? Just create a copy of the script in your Quicksilver Actions folder, change the username/password, and you can tweet from two accounts.

How to install:

1. Download the script, unzip, and put it here:
   ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions
2. Using Script Editor, modify these lines of the script to your Twitter username and password:

   set twitter_key_account to "your@email.com"
set twitter_key_pass to "your_password"

3. Restart Quicksilver.

How to use:

1. Invoke Quicksilver.
2. Enter text mode (hit period) and type your message.
3. Tab to the Action Pane and type “Tweet” (or as much of the word as you need).
4. Enter.

I hope you find this script useful. I’m no programmer, so I can’t support it. If you have addons or variations, please post them. Don’t forget to add me to your Twitter friends list. And thanks to all the coders that came before me and made this possible.

Update 4-21-07: Integrated Skype mood text updates as an option. See instructions for details.
Update 8-11-07: Integrated Facebook updates as an option. See this post: Update Twitter, Facebook, iChat, Adium, And Skype With Quicksilver
Update 5-24-09: I made a change to the curl script which should solve any previous problems.

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Tags: Apple, AppleScript, Growl, hacks, HowTo, iChat, IM, Keychain, Mac, OSX, plugins, productivity, Quicksilver, social, software, Technology, tools, tutorial, Twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, April 6th, 2007 at 8:25 pm and is filed under LifeHacks, Prose, Technology. You can leave a comment if you follow my Living Room Rules. If not, you can leave a trackback from your own site.