// the find
bengl3rt/twiliomax
A Max/MSP external for sending and receiving SMS via Twilio
A Max/MSP external object (C) that lets Max 6 patches send and receive SMS through the Twilio API, spinning up a local web server plus a localtunnel to handle inbound messages. It's for the narrow crossover of Max/MSP artists and interactive-installation builders who want SMS as an I/O device inside a patch.
The message protocol (sendsms/receivesms in, sms/receiving/sent out) is small and easy to reason about from the patch side. It embeds jsmn and mongoose directly rather than pulling in a heavier HTTP/JSON stack, which keeps the external's footprint reasonable for a Max plugin. The receivesms flow tackling the actual hard problem (exposing a local Mac behind a webhook via localtunnel) shows real engineering effort, not just a thin curl wrapper.
Last commit is from 2013 and the README says it's a work in progress with the author admitting they aren't sure libcurl is used thread-safely for concurrent receivesms instances — that's a real crash risk left unresolved. Error handling is broken by the author's own account: bad Twilio credentials fail silently instead of surfacing in the Max window. It only builds against the Max 6 SDK on Xcode 4.5/Mac OS X of that era, so it won't compile against any current Max SDK or toolchain without a rewrite. Depends on the abandoned progrium/localtunnel service and the author's own unmaintained clocaltunnel wrapper, both single points of failure with no fallback.