

iMessage from Terminal - chrisfsampaio
https://github.com/chrisfsampaio/imsg
Tired of getting off your terminal screen to answer that dickheads friends of yours?
Now you can curse them right on the terminal!
======
salgernon
Ah, Applescript. Almost, but not quite entirely unlike English. Boggling
syntax since 1991:

[http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf](http://www.cs.utexas.edu/~wcook/Drafts/2006/ashopl.pdf)

~~~
mikemoka
:-) a lot of people hoped that this was an opensource implementation of the
protocol that could easily be ported to Android I bet...

~~~
sneak
The iMessage/APNS initial registration protocol sends the hardware serial
number of the device it runs on to Apple as part of getting its client
certificate.

They're formulaic, so you can come up with valid ones that aren't your own,
but good luck doing that in a way that scales well and doesn't run your app
afoul of the DMCA.

------
niklasber
Would be nice if the Usage section was a bit beefed out. Now one either have
to look at code or install it to find out how to specify a contact to send
message to. Seems like good stuff though.

~~~
jzig
Agreed. Although if you follow the documentation as is, it gives you a list of
contacts to send the message to. Just tried it out. Not too shabby.

------
aktau
Cool. I immediately wanted to check out how it works to find out it works by
sending some bits to Messages.app through applescript. The most relevant
portion seems to be:

if is_i response puts "Sending \'#{str}\' to chat number #{response}"
`osascript -e 'tell application "Messages" to send \"#{str}\" to item
#{response.to_i} of text chats'` else puts "Sending \'#{str}\' to buddy
\'#{response}\'" `osascript -e 'tell application "Messages" to send \"#{str}\"
to buddy \"#{response}\"'` end

Though I must say I kinda like the way they've done it in OS X 10.9, where I
can respond inline even when I'm on another desktop.

The best thing about this is probably that you can send messages when you're
logged in to your OSX box remotely. Though for that to be handy it misses a
real "chat" feature, in which the app can also playback the messages you've
received.

~~~
aktau
I immediately thought it would be cool to make some of my cronscripts send
some messages to myself when something interesting happens. Sadly, the form
used in this utility does not lend itself to sending to self, Messages.app
returns an error when you try.

Turns out it's quite easy to get around, here's a gist that allows to you make
a nice mini-commandline app:
[https://gist.github.com/aktau/8958054](https://gist.github.com/aktau/8958054)

(reproduced here):

    
    
      #!/bin/sh
      exec <"$0" || exit; read v; read v; exec /usr/bin/osascript - "$@"; exit
       
      -- taken from:
      -- http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11812184/how-to-send-an-imessage-text-with-applescript-only-in-provided-service
      -- thanks to users @Senseful and @DigiLord
      on run {targetBuddyPhone, targetMessage}
          tell application "Messages"
              set targetService to 1st service whose service type = iMessage
              set targetBuddy to buddy targetBuddyPhone of targetService
              send targetMessage to targetBuddy
          end tell
      end run
    

Now I can do:

    
    
      $ imessage XXXXXXXXXX "gofinance: stock AAPL went up, possibly because of imessage..."
    

Where XXXXXXXXXX is my own number.

There are some other cool hacks with this, among others is a Lisp REPL with
iMessage: [https://46b.it/2012/hacking-with-
imessage](https://46b.it/2012/hacking-with-imessage).

------
twrkit
Was naively hopeful that someone had finally reversed the iMessage protocol.
Much to my chagrin, it's 'just' an Applescript wrapper. Nice work,
nonetheless!

------
__david__
Backticks, really? Don't ever use backticks if you have"#{}" in the string.

It should at least be doing something like this:
[http://porkrind.org/missives/calling-applescript-from-
ruby/](http://porkrind.org/missives/calling-applescript-from-ruby/)

------
skierscott
The user interface is shoddy. It took me a while to figure that you have to
type "imsg This is my message" then choose where to send it when prompted.

I included two issues to increase the usage docs as well as the ordering of
the conversation list.

