THIS POST HAS BEEN SUPERSEDED BY Twitter + Growl = Trowel v1.0

OK, so I’m new to Twitter. I didn’t (don’t) get it. Who wants to know what I’m doing? Well as I keep telling myself thats not the point. The point is to spread information, I had a lot of fun on Election night tweeting away about the coverage and calling states (I was surprisingly accurate).

The one thing that did annoy me was it added another website to check – not just a lunch but a refresh every 5 minutes. Something had to be done.

For anyone who has Adium installed on their Mac, you will be aware of Growl it’s a notification system that has yet to reach it’s full potential. As with background messages I wanted my incoming Tweets to be shown in small unobtrusive transparent bubble.

To cut a long story short – I couldn’t find anything. I found a few Ruby scripts (that didn’t work), I tried some nice applications but I didn’t want to run another app I wanted Growl!

So an hour or 2 or Googling and research for scripts I found some Perl modules that I could combine to produce the desired output.

My steps and code are listed below, its not 100% fool proof – please leave comments on how I can improve it.

1. Installing the Modules

You will need only 3 modules Mac::Growl, Net::Twitter and Date::Format, if your lucky Date::Format might even be already installed. Type the following commands into terminal.

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

This will launch a CPAN command line session to install the modules type (at the prompt):

> install Mac::Growl

Agree to any dependancies, when it done type:

> install Net::Twitter

Again agree to all dependancies, and lastly:

> install Date::Format

> exit

If you had any problems it may be because You need Apple’s Development tools installed, these are a free download form Apple. Please leave any problems in the comments.

2. Coding

Now for the code, just copy the following into a empty text file and save as some thing sensible like growl_tweet.pl:

#! /usr/bin/perl -wT

use Mac::Growl ':all';
use Net::Twitter;
use Date::Format;

my $app    = 'Growl/Twitter';
my @names  = ('New Tweet');

RegisterNotifications($app, \@names, [$names[0]]);

my $tweet = Net::Twitter->new( username=>'##REPLACE WITH USERNAME##', password=>'##REPLACE WITH PASSWORD##' );

my $last_id = undef;
my $switch = 0;

while(1)
{
 my @tt = ();

 if($last_id)
 {
 @tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 200, since_id => $last_id });
 }
 else
 {
 @tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 5 });
 }

 foreach my $t (@{$tt[0]})
 {
 if(!$switch) { $last_id = $t->{id}; $switch++; };

 PostNotification($app, $names[0], $t->{user}{screen_name}, $t->{text});

 printf("%s: %s\n", $t->{user}{screen_name}, $t->{text});

 print "sleep 4\n";

 sleep(4);
 }

 $switch = 0;

 print "sleep 37\n";
 sleep(37);
}

exit;

3. Running

Now, simply run the script:

$ perl ./growl_tweet.pl

And bingo! All your tweets appear! Leave a comment if it works and especially if it doesn’t – if there is enough interest I might consider adding features and real installer!

4. Here’s one I made earlier

If you would like the code, you can down load it here (with out any formatting issues).

http://www.echo-technology.co.uk/development/twitter+growl/growl.pl.txt