twitter How to initiate a Twitter DM from Alfred?

[Chris Messina]

I'd like to add more robust DM support to my Twitter Toolkit for Alfred workflow.

 

I've come up with a basic flow for how I think it could be achieved but would love your guidance and help on how to go about implementing it, since I'm not a developer:

 

0. Authenticate a local Twitter client to get one's followee list; store the list containing IDs, usernames, and display names
1. Load this list as a CSV into a List Filter
2. Use dm to access type-to-suggest completion using that List Filter in Alfred's UI
3. Upon actioning, open the URL prefilled with https://twitter.com/messages/{var:userId}-{query} (where query is the user ID of the recipient)
4. If a space is typed after the username, use that text to prefill message text

 

The basic user-facing flow would be:

1. Type `dm `
2. Starting typing usernames to initiate autocomplete
3. Choose the desired recipient from the list
4. Type the text of your message
5. Action in order to open a URL prefilled with the recipient ID and your type message.

 

Thoughts?

[deanishe]

What do you mean "a local Twitter client"? Getting the list of people you follow is the hard part.

 

A List Filter sounds a bit silly. Unless you're creating the list of people you follow manually (which sounds unpleasant), then you won't want to be editing the workflow, either. It should be a Script Filter.

[Chris Messina]

1 hour ago, deanishe said:

It should be a Script Filter

 

Cool, as I don't know how to write code to use the Script Filter, SGTM! 

 

I just need a way to populate Alfred so that after I type `dm`, it starts autosuggesting usernames from the people I follow, and then once I action it, it will grab that username and convert it to a user ID in order to slot-fill the URL! 😅

[deanishe]

1 hour ago, Chris Messina said:

Cool, as I don't know how to write code to use the Script Filter, SGTM!

 

It's pretty simple. Which language are you using?

[Chris Messina]

8 hours ago, deanishe said:

It's pretty simple. Which language are you using?

 

Perhaps it would make sense to use an existing Twitter Client to handle authentication, etc. Perhaps Twurl (GitHub repo) would be sufficient?