iMessages workflow?

[getthething]

I know there is a way to tell Alfred to "pass to URL scheme" so I set that to "imessage:" but it just brings Messages to the front and doesn't open a new message to that person (not to mention its slow to drill down to find the number)

 

Then I made a custom search URL with imessage:{query} which works but you have to actually to have people's numbers memorized and who does that anymore?! 

 

Would it be possible to have a workflow where you type a keyword and then a name and it will autocomplete numbers as you type? Seems like something that could be possible but I know next to nothing about scripts

[lukas]

Am I understanding this correctly when assuming you found a way to send iMessages using a script?

Would you mind sharing this? Since I was experimenting with this sort of thing for a totally different reason myself a while ago, I would really appreciate this

[jdfwarrior]

If you set up Custom Actions for Contacts you can make it pass the selected phone number into the imessage url scheme.

 

See screenshot here

 

As far as being able to autocomplete phone numbers... I wanted to say no, but apparently you can. You could have a script that would use mdfind to locate contacts and return data for you if you really wanted it. Wouldn't be something I would suggest, but if you really want to do it..

mdfind "kMDItemContentType=com.apple.addressbook.person && kMDItemTitle = '*Ferguson*'"

 

That would search for contacts where their name matched Ferguson. You'll probably be asked if you want to allow mdfind to search your contacts. That should return a list of files that match. Then you could run mdls on the files to get the data from them. As I said, this isn't something I recommend. I would just stick with creating a custom action for the phone number

[getthething]

If you set up Custom Actions for Contacts you can make it pass the selected phone number into the imessage url scheme.

 

See screenshot here

 

As far as being able to autocomplete phone numbers... I wanted to say no, but apparently you can. You could have a script that would use mdfind to locate contacts and return data for you if you really wanted it. Wouldn't be something I would suggest, but if you really want to do it..

mdfind "kMDItemContentType=com.apple.addressbook.person && kMDItemTitle = '*Ferguson*'"

 

That would search for contacts where their name matched Ferguson. You'll probably be asked if you want to allow mdfind to search your contacts. That should return a list of files that match. Then you could run mdls on the files to get the data from them. As I said, this isn't something I recommend. I would just stick with creating a custom action for the phone number

 

Ah ok. I was missing the // on my custom action. The problem I'm finding now is that if the phone number isn't formatted correctly in Contacts it won't create message to the right number. I guess I'll just have to reformat all my numbers. Thanks

[jdfwarrior]

Ah ok. I was missing the // on my custom action. The problem I'm finding now is that if the phone number isn't formatted correctly in Contacts it won't create message to the right number. I guess I'll just have to reformat all my numbers. Thanks

 

You can do that or just make a small script to do it. Doing a simple replace to get rid of parenthesis, hyphens, and spaces seems to work well.

 

Replace the, with nothing so it passes a string of numbers to the imessage url scheme