Getting Moody with Skype

Here’s my fun project for the evening. It’s more than likely that this has been done a million times, but I was bored and wanted the mental exercise, so here’s the result. Moody is a little action for Quicksilver that will let you type your status and mood string and send it to Skype in one fell swoop…

To install, just unzip the script into ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions. The tilde (~) is your user directory, and if the Actions folder doesn’t exist, you can create it. Then make sure that Enable Advanced Features is checked in the Quicksilver preferences, quit quicksilver and restart. You should now be able to launch Quicksilver, hit the period key to enter text mode, and type a mood string. When your string is complete (see next paragraph for formatting), hit tab and type “moody” or as much as necessary to get moody.scpt to show up. When you hit enter, your status and message will be changed (with Growl confirmation) in Skype.

I used a semi-natural language syntax for the script. You can set your status with an @ symbol followed by a keyword (no space), at the beginning or end of the string. It accepts the words “gone”, “away”, “home”, “here”, “back”, “busy”, and “dnd” for the @word. Whatever else you type becomes your mood message. So, typing “@away buying groceries” would set your status to AWAY and your mood message to buying groceries. If you open up the script, the keywords and associated status’ are in correlating lists that can be easily edited.

It’s just for fun, so feel free to use and modify.

Download moody.zip