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Use the Force to control your Mac, via Lilt

An excellent new app called ‘Lilt’ is out from Jon Nathan, the maker of such Mac gems as Docktop and Preferential Treatment.

Lilt allows you to control your Mac using the ambient light and sudden motion sensors on 2004+ iBooks/Powerbooks/Macbooks. By assigning actions to specific criteria (example: if the left light sensor goes darker by 25%, switch to the previous iTunes track), you can do almost anything using your hands. (Which, in retrospect, is a little creepy…)

LiltLilt

Jon has thoughtfully included several Applescripts in the downloadable image, and just as an fyi, you can also use the actions to launch applications or perform such actions as locking the screen or starting your screensaver.

Lilt uses the sensors of your portable Macintosh computer to initiate an action when the sensors detect a change. The sensors monitor the ambient light and sudden motion of your machine. When these sensors detect a change that is equal to or surpasses the threshold you’ve set in the main Lilt screen, the associated action will be triggered. The actions can do virtually anything. To assign an action, just click the “+” button to the right of the corresponding sensor. You can then choose any application, file, or script to launch or open.

If you’ve used an AppleScript file as your action, instead of opening the file, the script will be run. This makes Lilt very versatile indeed. Included on the Lilt disk image are example scripts that demonstrate many advanced features such as controlling iTunes, locking the screen, or displaying your current IP address. You can even use AppleScript to launch shell scripts.

When Lilt is launched, the actions are active, even if the application is not frontmost. To make the actions inactive, simply quit the application. Lilt utilizes the UniMotion Library to monitor the sudden motion sensors so it should work with all Macintosh portables built with SMS (iBooks, PowerBooks, & MacBooks).

Until November 30th, Lilt is free to use, but after that it goes up to a mere $5. Well worth every penny in my humble opinion…just while typing this paragraph, I moved my hand ever so slowly over my power button and switched iTunes tracks. No more cmd-tab or reaching for the mouse or obscure hotkeys. Not to mention that every time I do it, I feel like ObiWan (this is not the iTunes track you are looking for).

While I would love to see such options as allowing multiple actions per item (for instance, a left sensor dark at 10% = next track, whereas a left sensor dark at 100% = pause), I think that Jons done an amazing job here, and wrapped it all up rather nicely.

Give it a shot; you’re going to love it!

[EDIT]
Below are a few comments from Jon Nathan, developer of Lilt:

Thanks for the write-up. One note, when you use an AppleScript action in
Lilt, the application passes along information about the sensor that
triggered the action including the current and last reading. In this way you
can setup degrees of activation within your script via an if-then-else
block. For instance (in pseudo code):

if current reading is greater than or equal to 75% then
do A (e.g., lock the screen)
else if current reading is greater than or equal to 50% then
do B (e.g., mute the machine)
else
do C (change the iTunes track)
end

You can setup as many levels of degrees as you’d like which will handle
multiple actions within a single script. The power of scripts is what makes
Lilt so interesting.

In the next release, I have already been working on many more scripts
including controls for Exposé, DVD Player, and more and will also include
some concrete examples of the multiple actions in a single script that I’ve
described above.

One other thing, with the Application Set feature, you can also have
multiple actions assigned to the same sensor depending on which application
is active when the sensor passes the threshold trigger. If no Application
Set exists for the current active application, then the action assigned to
the Unspecified Global Set (if one is assigned) will be triggered.

Sounds great.
:)

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