If you’ve read this blog before, you know that I love the Quicksliver application. To date, the existing bundled plugins and readily available plugi
ns have met my needs. Although lately, I’ve notice that I really would have like to have a shortcut to set my Adium online status to Away. After a little bit of Goggle-ing I found a number of solutions. However, none seem too clean as you needed to use an outdated plugin (if you can find it) or write some script. I did find a useful blog entry that allowed me tackle this problem a little differently.
In Adium I’ve have a number of Away status options already created. Each with it’s own messages, etc. All the solutions I found basically have you type in a status and then it will set Adium to away. I thought there must be a cleaner way to do this. Why can’t we just use the built-in capabilities of Adium? When I started looking into the different options, it quickly became evident I would have to spend some time educating myself on Applescript, Adium capabilities, and Quicksilver abilities. Way too much work!
After a little more Goggle-ing, I found an older article that Yasser Dahab writes in The Apple Blog about how to get Quicksilver to access your menu bar. Since Adium exposes the online availability on the menu bar, you can use the steps in the article to set your Adium online availability without any code. There are some items that you will need to do in order to get Yasser’s advice to work:
First you’ll need to set up Quicksilver to expose advance features. This feature is found in the Application section in the Quicksilver application’s preferences:
Next, you have to enable Quicksilver to use ‘Proxy Objects’. You’ll find this by going into the Catalog option and selecting Quicksilver from the preferences of Quicksilver. You’ll notice an entry ‘Proxy Objects’ — this may or may not be selected. Go ahead and select it.
Now – simply follow the directions in Yasser’s article, but use Adium as your current application. Which is to say, select Adium to make it the active application, then launch Quicksilver and follow the steps that are provided.
Bonus – instead of waiting for Quicksilver to learn all these steps as you go, you can simply create a trigger to the action. I have mine assigned to Control-A. The only downside is that I have to hit <enter> after my Control-A as the trigger actually pulls up an option box. Simply hitting <enter> will close the window. I’d like to find a workaround for this, but for now, it does 95% of what I want and I didn’t have to mess with any code, etc.
Hope this helped someone out!
-JT