twitsilver 0.2

A Quicksilver client for twitter

Twitsilver is a Quicksilver action for posting to twitter.

It features

• Growl support

• Keychain support

• easy two-step-installation.

Installation

Twitsilver installation is a two step process:

1. easy_install the code

2. custom install the Quicksilver action

This is because distutils (as a pure python, platform independant tool) doesn’t know anything about Quicksilver actions. Therefore we create a quicksilver-aware installer for you, which you must invoke manually after easy_install has done its magic.

In other words, open the Terminal (/Applications/Utitlities/Terminal.app) and execute the following two commands:

sudo easy_install twitsilver
install_twitsilver

If this fails due to missing PATH entries, you need to find the install_twitsilver script and execute it. As mentioned above, due to the sandbox restrictions of distutils it can’t be copied to a more convenient location.

The installer will create a Quicksilver action and register twitsilver with growl. Unfortunately, the python bindings for Growl don’t provide a way to actually enable the notifications it registrs. This means, you need to:

• open the System Preferences control panel

• select Growl

• click the Applications tab

• select Twitsilver from the list

• click Configure…

• click Notifications

• select failure and success and for each click on enabled

After that you need to restart Quicksilver (Command-Control-q) and you’re good to go.

Usage

Now you can invoke Quicksilver and press . to enter text mode. Type the message you want to post to twitter, hit the tab key and start to type tweet until the action shows up. Now just hit enter to invoke the it.

Credentials

Twitsilver uses the Mac OS X Keychain to know which username and password to use. It first checks, whether Twitterrific has any credentials stored and if so, it uses those.

If not, it falls back to an item by the name of twitter. To create this entry, open up Keychain Access and add a new password item (Command-n), give it the name twitter and your username and password.

Growl

Theoretically, twitsilver should also work without Growl, but this hasn’t been tested, as there is no sane reason any Mac OS X user should not install this insanely useful utility :-)

After contacting twitter and posting the message twitsilver will use Growl to notify you that it has succeeded. If not, it will post twitters error message.

Of course, twitsilver checks the length of your message and will refuse to post it, if it’s longer than the infamous 140 characters.

TODO

• use an URL shortening service to shorten any URLs before posting to twitter.

• add a nicer icon (for growl)

• twitsilver has no pony. This is unacceptable in the long run