Growl + Twitter Improved

I’ve got a full-blown Twitter addiction. There are plenty of ways to get my fix throughout the day: RSS, IM, SMS, Twitterriffc, or just looking at the dang site itself.

But I’m also addicted to Growl, the global notification system for Mac OS X (that Apple should be shipping with Leopard, cough). Throughout the day I have all sorts of data pouring across the bottom of my screen thanks to Growl, from incoming emails to IM status messages to completed downloads. Twitter updates would fit right in!

I’m not the first guy to have this idea. Matt Bidulph of Hackdiary put together a clever, terse Ruby script that does the job. Unfortunately, Matt’s script is a bit lacking in the features department.

So I’m breaking you off a piece of the remix with my own twitter_monitor.rb. It uses the absolute latest Twitter Ruby gem from John Nunemaker, which includes a lil’ patch from me to grab the full spectrum of data available from Twitter’s API.

My script adds the following features to Matt’s original:

• Retrieval, caching, refreshing, and display of your friends’ user icons.


• Use of ~/.twitter to store your username and password, as per the Twitter gem.


• Daemonization to work around Growl’s strained relationship with cron (see the Growl forum for more on this).


• Error checking all over the place to survive network failures, etc.

You’ll want to sudo gem install twitter daemons and make sure that growlnotify is being called from the right path before you fire this thing up. Once you do, expect a warm fuzzy feeling every 15 minutes (or whenever you set it for) as your friends’ latest musings float by.

Ahh. Twitter.