Ubiquity Rocks Tweeter's World

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natemate: This Ubiquity is rockin'!

Mark_Reeder: just installed Ubiquity and I'm playing around with the different commands - quite impressive.

danielandrews: ubiquity may be the thing that gets me to switch to Firefox.

Oh, boy. For a 0.1 release, Ubiquity is already a bullet train to Bonerville. Holy. Shit. http://xrl.us/oomzd

Install the prototype and you’ll be presented with a tutorial to get you started.

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  
• Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that gives you a powerful new way to interact with the Web.

You're used to telling Firefox where you want to go by typing Web addresses into the URL bar:

With Ubiquity installed, you'll be able to tell Firefox what you want it to do by typing commands into a new Ubiquity input box.

Ubiquity commands can do nearly anything. Ubiquity comes with a set of commands that make common Web tasks faster and easier. In this tutorial, we'll teach you how to use some of the them. By the end of this tutorial you'll be able to perform a quick wikipedia, google, definition, and yelp searchs; add maps to your email; and translate a snippet of a web page, highlight a word, and then email it to a friend.

The commands that come with Ubiquity are just the beginning: anyone can create new commands and share them. Creating Ubiquity commands—and extending the web—should be as easy as creating a web page. If you want to learn how to create your own commands, please see the Developer Tutorial.

Ubiquity is still a work in progress, and we are eager for you to join our virtual team to experiment. If, when reading this tutorial, you think of a way that Ubiquity could be made easier to use, or an idea for its future development, we hope you'll take a moment to share your thoughts. By getting involved with Ubiquity while the project is still in its early stages, you have an opportunity to shape the direction of its growth.

Emailing

Right now, the email command uses Google Mail. That means you'll only be able to follow along with the next part of the tutorial if you have a GMail account. Eventually, of course, the command should work with all major web-based email providers, as well as applications like Thunderbird. (If you're a programmer, we'd love some help with that.) For now, if you have a GMail account, please make sure you're logged in. If you don't, you might want to skip ahead to the next part of the tutorial.

Assuming you're logged into your GMail account, issue "email". In the suggestion list, you'll see a suggestion that says "Email (message) (to contact)".

This is a clue that the Email command expects two pieces of information: the message is what you're emailing, and the contact is who you want to send it to. However, you can leave out one of these things — or both of them — and the Email command will still work. So I can issue any of these commands:

• "email hello"
• "email to chris"
• "email hello to chris"
• "email to chris hello"

I'm using "chris" because that's the name of someone in my GMail contacts list. If you don't have a "chris" in your contacts list, just substitute the name of any of your friends in these examples.

Let's say I've found an interesting fact on a web page and I want to send it to Chris. I can select part of the page, including links, pictures, and anything else, and then issue "email this to chris". Ubiquity understands "this" to refer to my selection. (I could also have said "email it to chris" or "email selection to chris" -- all of these are equivalent.) The selected part of the page shows up in my preview:

(Actual email addresses blurred out to protect the innocent.) Since I know several people named Chris, there are several lines in the suggestion list -- one each Chris in my GMail contacts list. I can arrow-key down to the Chris I want and then hit the Enter key.

I'm taken to the GMail "compose new email" page. The chunk of the page that I selected is reproduced in the body of my email, the "to" field is filled with the email address I selected, and the "subect" field contains the title of the web page I was on. I can now edit this email to add anything else I want to say, before clicking "Send".