Twitter, Quicksilver, Keychain and the phantom credit snatcher!

So I was going to write a post about how to waste more of your life using Twitter but do it more efficiently using Quicksilver. I had half a script written, but I thought I would integrate it with Keychain to make it really nice.

After a little searching it turns out Coda Hale has already done a perfect job of integrating Twitter and Quicksilver using Applescript. Well done him, but what a git for stealing my thunder!

Anyway, I thought I would write some comments about basic integrating with Keychain instead, to make up for my lack of having a Twitter script quite as nice as Coda’s.

To access the Keychain, instead of using Keychain.app, instead you use Keychain Scripting.app. This is a non-GUI app that allows Applescript access to the keychain, so it still has a dictionary to use as a reference.

You can access information in the Keychain in several ways. You can either access the keys by type, i.e Internet Key, Appleshare Key, etc or by the Keychain it is in. You can also lock and unlock Keychains. Like all instances of doing stuff with the Keychain a permission dialogue will confirm to the user any changes being made. If you are running the Applescript from an application, such as Quicksilver, the application’s name will be on the request. It may also ask for permission for Keychain Scripting. This might be a barrier when writing stuff for general consumption as users might find it confusing.

While I sometimes moan about Apple not supporting Applescript properly with some of their applications, Keychain Scripting does rather a lot. You can do pretty much anything you can do in Cocoa to the keychain right here. It’s worth knowing, because the keychain is really one of the best features of OS X. Next step, I may write something to use 1passwd logins in Curl/Wget.

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Quicksilver, AppleScript, Mac, Productivity, Security, keychain, 1passwd, codahale, twitter