For some time my desktop has been an older, underpowered Linux box, so using services like Twitter via the website has been painful, as loaded with heavy javascript that would consume my CPU's limited resources.

So, like any Python programmer would do, I wrote my own client. Well, lets be honest, the hard work was done by the tweepy library, I'm just using it. I call it Twit, and I've been using it to post for some time now, lightweight from the command-line. I also keep one running, polling my account for new posts, and notifying me when there are new posts and pulling them down.

My notifications come in many forms, depending on the command-line options. I can just watch them show up in text in the shell, I can use xosd to display notifications on your X11 desktop, It can use libnotify in Gnome to display temporary notifications that drop down in the corner of the screen.

As I'm now playing with an OS X desktop, libnotify isn't supported. I could use xosd along with XQuartz, but I'd prefer more native integration with OS X, as it does have a notification system, via AppKit. Python is preinstalled on OS X, and the AppKit module is included. I found a great example of how to use it online, which made this much, much simpler, so thanks there.

I used it like so:

def notify_appkit(status, options):
    """Thanks to
    https://github.com/albertz/music-player/blob/master/notifications.py
    for how to do this."""
    global notifCenter
    if not notifCenter:
        import AppKit
        notifCenter = \
            AppKit.NSUserNotificationCenter.defaultUserNotificationCenter()
        appDelegate = AppKit.NSApplication.sharedApplication().delegate()
        notifCenter.setDelegate_(appDelegate)

    notif = AppKit.NSUserNotification.alloc().init()
    title = "Tweet by %s" % status.user.name
    notif.setTitle_(title)
    notif.setInformativeText_(status.text)
    notifCenter.deliverNotification_(notif)

Now, this does cause a little icon on the dock to jump up and down, so I'll need to look into that, and how to open the browser to twitter or the embedded link when the notification is clicked on, but it's a good start.