Leopard Spotlight: Control another Mac with iChat and AppleScript
Rob Griffiths over at Macworld points to an interesting new feature in Leopard's iChat: the ability to run AppleScripts in response to events. If you look in the Alerts tab of iChat's preferences there's a checkbox for running an AppleScript when a user selectable event (e.g. a text invitation) occurs. As you can see above, Apple includes three default scripts that allow for automatically accepting or declining an invitation, and better yet, controlling iTunes.
How might this be useful? One obvious way is controlling a music server in a different room just by sending IMs. "You can... send the iTunes-owning Mac these commands as chat messages from another Mac: status, next, previous, mute, unmute, help, play, and pause." A nifty little addition to iChat, I think, and since you can add your own AppleScripts, it opens up the possibility of doing something similar for a variety of other applications as well. (Incidentally, these built-in scripts live at /Library/Scripts/iChat.)
