The group over at Devil’s Kitchen recently went through some of the tutorials we’ve offered about how to Control your Mac with Twitter and Screen Sharing. While working through the tutorials they found this interesting view of a Mac that has used screen sharing to open screen sharing back to the original Mac.

Its almost as looking into a mirror with a mirror behind you…. Open up Photo Booth and you’ll see yourself move into digital eternity!

Like Safari and many of the other Apple applications, iChat supports custom plugins that allow you to customize or optimize your iChat experience.

One great plugin for iChat is Chax. Chax is made by the same developer that brought us WARP for Spaces and adds some great features to iChat.

Merge Your iChat Contact Lists

If you’re a user of multiple instant messaging accounts, Chax will automatically create a new merged contact list for you. Once this list is in view feel free to close your iChat contact lists for AIM, .MAC, and Google Talk.

Additional Features

Additional Chax features include:

1. Unified contact list shows all contacts from all accounts in one window
2. Growl notifications for new messages and users changing status
3. Automatically resize the contact list to fit the number of visible users
4. Built-in log viewer
5. Activity log that displays your contacts’ status changes
6. Auto-accept file transfers, AV chats, and screen sharing requests
7. Toggle text status visibility of users
8. Always on top option for contact list, message windows and AV chats
9. Set font of names, status messages, and group separators
10. Option to auto-accept text chats, skipping new message notification window
11. Show status changes directly in the message window
12. Additional unread message notifications in the Dock
13. Automatically go away when the screensaver activates
14. Properly use ICQ accounts without sending text formatting in messages

Chax is a free download and may be just what you need to get the most out of iChat. Installing Chax is a breeze and a great addition to iChat. What iChat plugins do you use?

Have you ever been in a meeting and realized that you had forgotten to bring the latest version of a file with you, been out on the town when you remembered you’d left your computer on and the power bill has just been unbearable lately, or forgotten when your mother-in-laws birthday was and needed to know fast?

Never fear, Now you can use Twitter to have your mac send you the important file, turn off your computer to keep your power bill low, and send your phone the date of your Mother in Law’s birthday.

With some initial setup you can have your Mac ready to provide you with the information you need while away from the computer and on the go. To get started we’ll need a Twitter account.

Getting Started

Twitter is a social networking site that provides:

A service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Twitter allows users to post short messages on the web, through email, or with SMS txt messages that will be delivered to their friends via email, txt messages, or rss feeds.

Additionally, twitter’s communication network will allow you to send instructions to your Mac.

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

1. Setup an account at twitter.com. Follow the onscreen instructions and be sure to enter the email address you have setup with Mail on your Mac.
2. Create preset tasks in Automator that can perform actions that you may need your Mac to do when you’re away from your computer. Save the Automator actions as an app.
3. Create an Apple Script that will launch the application you just created
4. Setup rules in Mail to execute the created Apple Script when certain new messages or RSS feed updates are received from Twitter.

To help make this process easier for you to setup on your own Mac, I’ll walk the process to control your Mac with Twitter and use a fun automator task that takes a picture using Photo Booth and sends it in an email.

Creating a Task in Automator: Take a Picture

Before you create a task in Automator be sure that you’ve setup your Twitter account. Next open Automator from your Applications folder and add these steps to your workflow to tell your Mac to take a picture and send it to your email address:

1. Hide All Applications - This will hide any open application on your system and make sure no open windows distract from the rest of the workflow
2. Launch Application - Photo Booth
3. Watch Me Do - The best way to add this part of the workflow is to open Photo Booth, click the Record button in Automator, select Photo Booth and then press the keyboard shortcut that will have Photo Booth take a picture (command + T).
4. Pause - Set this to 7 seconds so that Photo Booth has enough time to take and save the picture
5. Quit Application - Photo Booth
6. Find Finder Items - Set the Where to Pictures, the Whose should include Kind (is Image), date created (is today), extension (is equal to jpg), and name (contains Photo). These filters will tell Automator to find the all the photo booth pictures taken that day including the one just taken.
7. New Mail Message - be sure to add the email address you’d like the pictures sent to, the subject and anything in the message you’d like to include.
8. Pause - Set this to 3 seconds so Mail can add the photo files to the email message
9. Send Outgoing Messages - Sends the mail and pictures

You can test the workflow to ensure that its working properly by clicking the Run option in Automator. This should email out the photos its just taken in Photo Booth.

Now that we have created the workflow we’d like our Mac to follow we need to save it as an application so that it can be executed in the future. I personally have created a folder in Applications directory that I store my automated applications in and saved this app as TwitterPhoto.app.

Creating A Script to Launch an Application

With the application created and saved the next item we need to setup is the Apple Script that will launch the application. If you’ve never created an Apple Script before don’t worry, this will be the easiest script you’ve ever created.

1. To keep things simple, close your other applications and open Finder to the folder you’ve saved your TwitterPhoto application in
2. Open Script Editor - Fastest Way to find it is through Spotlight
3. Click Record
4. Select TwitterPhoto.app in Finder - You should see Script Editor automatically add text to its window. Click Stop
5. Save the Script

Congrats, you’ve just created a script that will launch the application we just created in Automator. But there is still some work to do before we can test out Twitter’s control over our Mac.

Setting up Mail Rules

The last aspect of setting up your Mac so that you can control it through twitter is configuring Mail. Once you have Mail opened you can either use email messages from Twitter to tell your Mac to execute tasks, or you can add your twitter RSS feed to your Mail application.

With Mail setup to receive information from Twitter, you’re ready to establish Rules in Mail that will launch your TwitterPhoto script and thus your application.

To setup a Rule that will execute a script when a certain command is sent from Twitter to Mail:

1. In Mail, Click Mail on the menu bar and then Preference
2. Select the Rules Tab and click Add Rule
3. Enter a Name for the rule and then be sure that All conditions must be met for this rule
4. Add the following conditions: Message Content Contains - Twitter; Message Content Contains - Take Picture; Message Type is RSS (Select Mail if you’re going to use the Mail Messages from Twitter); From Contains [enter twitter delivery email address here] (This is only needed if you are using Mail instead of RSS)
5. Add the following actions: Run AppleScript [Select the script we created earlier]

Click Ok and apply the rule. The Message Contents of “Twitter” and “Take Picture” in the rule are the key words that we’re telling your Mac to look for.

When we send those words through Twitter it will know to run the script that will take the picture of the person at the desk and send it in an email.

Control Your Mac With Twitter

Now that your Mac is setup to receive instructions from Twitter you should be ready to send your first instruction. Either from Twitter.com or if you’ve already setup your cell phone with Twitter, send a message that includes the following text, “Twitter Take Picture”.

Once the message is sent through twitter you will receive an email that should trigger the rule we created and cause your Mac to take a picture using Photo Booth. If you setup the rule with RSS feed you may need to manually update the feed for it to get the new instruction.

If all has gone well, you will have an email with a picture of you looking amazed at the power of your Mac and the convenience using Twitter may bring to your life.

Conclusion

You can follow these same steps but customize the Automator workflow 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.

What Automator tasks will you create to use with Twitter?

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Spaces is a great addition to OS X that helps you add order to all your open applications. In previous posts we explained how to get started with Spaces, how to assign an application its own Space, and then how to move from one Space to another with just your mouse.

All of those features make Spaces a great addition to OS X but Part 4 of hints and tips for getting the most of of Spaces will provide the final tip to have ultimate control over what Spaces you want your applications in.

Although you can assign an application its own Space, sometimes you just want to move a few of the open windows you’re working with to their own space. Spaces makes this easy.

We mentioned in previous article that pressing F8 (Or fn + F8 with the new Apple Keyboards) will display all your spaces at once and include an outline of the open Windows in each space.

To move one of your open application windows to a new space, press F8 and then simply click on one of the windows and drag it to the space that you’d like the window to sit in. You can have multiple windows from the same application open in different windows.

Hit return when you’re finished moving each space to its ideal window and cycle through each space to make sure the windows are where you want them to be.

New OSX 10.5 feature Spaces allows users to manage their workspace by dividing application windows any way you want.

We recently mentioned how keyboard shortcuts can help you switch easily between each of your Spaces but there is an even easier way to do this.

Warp, a free download and preference pane, allows to switch between all of their spaces using their mouse instead of the keyboard.

You can setup your Warp preference pane to switch to a new space when you move your mouse to the edge of the screen. Or preview your space before switching to it:

Warp offers the ability to display a live preview of a space when you move the mouse to the edge of the screen, allowing you to see what you have on another space before actually switching to it. Clicking the preview will then warp you to that space.

Once you’ve installed Warp on your system, open System Preferences and you’ll notice the new Warp preference option under Other.

Select it and then customize how you’d like Warp to work on your system. When you’re finished and Warp is active, move your mouse to the edge of your screen and see yourself Warp to the next Space.

If you’re already a fan of Spaces, Warp is a must have addition. If you’re still getting use to Spaces, Warp may just make it that much easier to use.

How do you use Spaces?