Filed under: Software, Cool tools, Odds and ends, Freeware, Internet Tools, Developer, AppleScript
TweetMyMac: Remote control of your Mac via Twitter
Important safety tip: Please read the instructions for TweetMyMac carefully, especially the part about creating a separate Twitter account for your Mac -- do not use your regular Twitter account, or anyone you follow will be able to control your machine.
We have previously covered some of the ways in which it is possible to remotely control a Mac at home or in the office. Most of our suggestions have required the use of Mail in order to process some rule and kick off a script or Automator action.
Alex P over at TheMacBox aims to change all of that. Enter TweetMyMac, the little program that lets you get screenshots, iSight snapshots, or launch a program through the use of Twitter. While the list of commands available is not currently as comprehensive as what your imagination can create with a little AppleScript or Automator whizzbangery, it is a good list and growing as well.
An obvious benefit of this approach is the ease of getting everything set up. In the past it took an AppleScript to call another Automator action or some other kludgey-at-best method to get things working. With TweetMyMac there is very little effort required for setup.
Another neat feature is that TweetMyMac will run a shell command. With a little scripting you can create your own custom commands. And using the previously-covered technique of sending tweets via the command line you can have your custom commands send information back to you as well.
In my experience the software does have a few bugs/quirks, but that is to be expected with a beta release. One of the niggles I ran into was that the commands have to be exact. For example, sending "what is my ip?" will not be processed whereas sending "ip" will be processed as expected. It tripped me up a few times and from a user-experience perspective it would be nice to be fixed, but from the developer's point of view I can see the difficulty in coding around the whims of users.
I was also not able to get the screenshot command to work from my Mac mini, but in talking with the developer it seems to be an isolated incident. The other issue I hit was that the same command would not be processed twice in a row. Alex has been a big help and it is obvious that getting this app working well is important.
You can check out the list of available commands over at TweetMyMac's homepage. TweetMyMac is currently in beta and available for free, but donations are welcome because developers like to eat too. Do you have any other remote Mac automation tools that you use? Shout out in the comments, because I know I'm always looking for ways to wrangle my home server into line.
[Via Lifehacker]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
nightshrill said 3:09PM on 9-02-2009
this looks like a terrible idea solely on the basis of security.
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Ryan Trevisol said 3:18PM on 9-02-2009
This sounds awesome from a get-a-remote-picture-from-your-isight point of view, but as noted, the security concerns are worrisome . . . isn't twitpic searchable and quasi public?
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Alex P said 3:38PM on 9-02-2009
You can set your pictures as private using TwitPic's options (if you want to), and given that custom shell commands are disabled by default there isn't anything particularly dangerous someone who had compromised your account could do, short of having your Mac say annoying phrases, at which point you could quit the app and sort your account issues!
Ryan Trevisol said 4:19PM on 9-02-2009
Sweet. Now the only trouble is creating 30+ accounts for all the iSight enabled student computers at my school.
Rob E. said 9:58PM on 9-02-2009
On testing, I do think there is a security issue with TwitPic. I can set my images to not show up in the Public Timeline, but, unlike protected Twitter posts, TwitPic images are easily accessible by going to twitpic.com/photos/username. I don't know what discovery mechanisms there are for finding those images, but if someone knew your TweetToMyMac account, they could view your images. You just have to weigh how likely it is that someone will stumble on that, and how much information they're likely to glean. I would like to use the feature to check fairly benign things, like the progress of a given task, but if there's likely to be sensitive information on your screen, you should probably use with caution.
Alex P said 3:25AM on 9-03-2009
It's also worth noting you can login to TwitPic and delete any images permanently if you notice something sensitive on them.
rlaska said 4:14PM on 9-02-2009
Being able to tell your mac to go to a URL is also a security concern. (Drive-by browser vulnerabilities)
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astrosaurus said 3:48PM on 9-02-2009
I just tried out a photo from my iSight. Would much prefer to see the photo via DM rather than an @reply. Pretty cool though.
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rlaska said 4:20PM on 9-02-2009
Also, you could set your mac's twitter account to private, so that the world wouldn't see your twitpic links.
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neko said 4:21PM on 9-02-2009
i have this set up on my macbook. it only listens to people it follows, which is me and only me, and i have both its stream and its twitpics set to private. there shouldn't be a security issue.
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Funkboy said 5:07PM on 9-02-2009
Very fun, procrastinating from homework with this, however the isight command, when it tweets the picture it is just a black screen. Why does it do that? I see the little light come on and everything!
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Rob E. said 5:23PM on 9-02-2009
I imagine that every method of remote access has its own set of security issues, but if you set it up properly, it seems like you'd limit your risk. You are relying, of course, on the security of TwitPic and Twitter, though, which are just two more places where it seems security might be compromised, but that doesn't mean this is too insecure to use. For my part, I could definitely imagine a few uses for it. At the moment my main method of controlling my Mac is via ssh with good ol' VNC for things that I need to see. Twitter could definitely be a good option given that you could do a lot more without actually being at a computer if you tweet from your phone. I have to say that Twitter programs are generally easier to use on my iPod Touch than SSH programs, so as long as you know what you're going to want to do, it could be handy. Right now I'm thinking that I'd like to log on for the sole purpose of seeing how a file conversion is progressing. A simple screen shot would accomplish the same thing with less effort, so this could be very handy.
I'm experimenting with another way to remote control my Mac: the Mir:ror from Violet. It is not as versatile as other methods as it requires both computers to have a Mir:ror installed, and it requires an RFID chip to be read by the Mir:ror, but that combination of required items may serve as a sort of security feature in itself. The Mir:ror can execute applescripts, and you can specify that the applescripts run on a computer connected to a specific mirror or on the computer whose mirror senses the object. At the moment, I can turn off Prowl notifications on my iPod by showing my mirror the RFID chip I keep tucked in my iPod case. I can start my SImplify program at home from my work Mir:ror if I want to listen to any music that I haven't brought with me. Like TweetMyMac it suffers from needing specific scripts to be set up in advance, but I'm looking for other ways to make it useful, provide Violet finds a way to stay in business.
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Timm said 8:38PM on 9-02-2009
Why bother when you can use Telekinesis from your iPhone or any other computer?
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