twitsilver 0.2

Description:

twitsilver 0.2

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:

easy_install the code
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