Setting Adium Status Messages with Quicksilver

2008-11-09T00:00:00+01:00

Switching from Pidgin to Adium, one missing feature was the saved status messages for different accounts. I have an ICQ account with only German contacts, and an AIM account with only American contacts. In Pidgin, I can create and save a status message “Dining Hall” that will set both accounts to away and set different status messages for each of them, e.g. “Mensa” for the ICQ and “At the dining hall” for AIM. In fact, I can save such collections of status data where both the status and the status message is different for any of my IM accounts.

In Adium I can only define saved statuses with a single status and a single message, and then apply any of those saved statuses to any single account or to the entirety of all my accounts.

However, with AppleScript, this is easy to add. The Adium’s AppleScript API was a little hard to find, but once you have that, the rest is easy. For example, I’ll create a script AdiumDiningHall.applescript in ~/Library/Scripts with the following lines:

#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "micgoe01" to go online
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "175434867" to go online</code>

tell application "Adium" to tell the account "micgoe01" to go away
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "175434867" to go away

tell application "Adium" to set status message of account "micgoe01" to "At the dining hall"
tell application "Adium" to set status message of account "175434867" to "Mensa"

If I leave out the first part about going online, the status will only be set for accounts that are already online. I could also write a script that sets all accounts to Available:

#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "michaelgoerz@gmail.com" to go online
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "175434867" to go online</code>

tell application "Adium" to tell the account "micgoe01" to go available
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "175434867" to go available

Or one that signs out of all my accounts:

#!/usr/bin/osascript
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "micgoe01" to go offline
tell application "Adium" to tell the account "175434867" to go offline</code>

The beauty of having these scripts in ~/Library/Scripts/ is that they are available to QuickSilver. I just hit Cmd+Space, type part of my script name, hit Enter, and my predefined status is set in Adium. It doesn’t get any faster than that.

Homepage of Michael Goerz - adium

Setting Adium Status Messages with Quicksilver