I want to share with you a small tweak I came up with a couple of days ago. As some of you know, Mac OS X includes a ton of very handy utilities. One of them is say. The name is pretty descriptive, you pass it a string and it voices it, using text-to-speech engine, that is built in Mac OS. Try it now:

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$ say Hello world!

You can use it anywhere where you can invoke shell commands. Here’s my capistrano after-hook, for example:

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after 'deploy' do
  `say Sire, our unicorns have been deployed`
  # note the backticks. This string is roughly equivalent to
  # system "say Sire, our unicorns have been deployed"
end

Now I can launch my cap deploy (which can take minute or two) and go read Hacker News or whatever. I will be told when deploy is finished. I’m using this for a few days already and it still make me smile everytime. I should probably come up with more creative messages.

Happy tweaking!