Twitip

Twitter can control your Mac. Today Danny Hinckley from Maciverse (follow him @dhinckley) explains how to do it.

One of the best things about Twitter is its adaptability to the tools we use in our everyday lives. In addition to its increased use with cell phones, Twitter is also very useful for performing tasks on your computer, especially when you’re away from it.

Now you can use Twitter to have your Mac send you important files, turn off your computer to keep your power bill low, send an email with the date of your Mother in Law’s birthday, and many other functions you perform when you do not have access to your Mac.

With some initial setup you can have your Mac ready to provide you with the information you need away from the computer and on the go.

Setup your Mac for Twitter Control

To be able to control your Mac with Twitter you’ll need to follow these steps:

1. Setup your twitter account with your cell phone details so that you can update your status on the go, or use Twitter applications like Twitterific on your iPhone.
2. Create preset tasks with Apple’s Automator application. This will allow your computer to perform actions that you may need your Mac to do when you’re away from it. Save these as apple scripts. A number of sample Automator actions can be found at Maciverse.com
3. Setup rules in Mail to execute the created Apple Script when certain new messages or RSS feed updates are received from Twitter.

After you’ve followed these three steps you’ll be ready to perform tasks by updating your Twitter Status. When your computer receives email messages or RSS Feed updates from your twitter account it will check them for key words that you assigned in your Mail rules.

You can test the process from either Twitter.com or if you’ve already setup your cell phone with Twitter, send a status update that includes the keyword text designated in your Mail rule.

Once the message is sent through twitter, Mail will receive an email or RSS update that should trigger the rule you created to perform an Automated task. Watch as your computer acts on its own, all triggered from your twitter status update.

Conclusion

Customize various Automator workflows to instruct your Mac on different actions you’d like it to run while you’re away. Be sure to create a separate script and a rule for each process you’d like your Mac to run when it receives instructions from you via Twitter.

The combination of Twitter status updates and your computer acting on them can be very useful or used for fun. Be sure to check out our complete instructions for how to build an automated task that will take a picture using your iSite camera and send the results to your email address when it receives key words via twitter.