When I was young there was a program for my little black and white Macintosh Classic II called the 'Talking Moose'. The Talking Moose had no other purpose than to allow a small cartoon Moose to appear in the corner of the screen and make silly comments in a voice like Stephen Hawking: it was quite magical for a nine year old and I still have fond memories of the program.

As system software progressed I found the Talking Moose would no longer run on my computer - I lost track of the Moose and sadly he disappeared from my life.  But reading Digg the other day I discovered out that the Moose is now back as something of an internet superstar.  The only difference is that Talking Moose is now broadcasting his witticisms through Twitter: all you have to do is add him as a friend in order to receive the benefit of his wit.

Putting the Moose to Work

If it wasn't enough to find out that the Talking Moose was twittering away from some remote corner of the internet  Jason Snell at Mac World had worked out how to get him to speak!  I was a bit disappointed with his script though, he had managed to get the computer to speak twitter messages sent by the moose but there wasn't the accompanying cartoon moose: just the Moose's disembodied voice.

I decided to work out a way to adapt Jason's script to get the moose to read all of my twitter messages.  I realised I could easily adapt Jason Snell's scripts to work with a program called Uli's Moose (a modern scriptable version of the Talking Moose for OS X).

Here's how I got the moose to read my Twitter messages:

You will need:

• Twitteriffic
• Uli's Moose
• Some Applescripts described below

Step 1: Change Twitterfic

I opened up my mac Terminal and entered:

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific processTweetScriptPath -string ~/moosetweet.scpt

This altered Twitteriffic's preferences so that every time a new tweet loads it runs the Applescript 'moosetweet.scpt'.

Step 2: Open up Uli's Moose

Now I wanted the cool moose animation I had always loved so I opened up Uli's Moose.

Step 3: Script it

I adapted Jason Snell's Applescript to tell Uli's Moose to speak my Tweets out aloud.  Here's is the adapted script:

on process_tweet(tweetId, tweetDate, tweetScreenName, tweetUserName, tweetUserUrl, tweetUserImageUrl, tweetText, tweetType)

tell application "Moose"
speak tweetText
end tell

end process_tweet

I saved the file as 'moosetweet.scpt' and stored it in my home folder. 

Step 4: Wait for a tweet

All I had to do then was wait for the moose to start reading my Twitter messages.  I think he's even better now that he does useful work for me... Come to think of it he always was a bit of a loafer compared to the other programs.