Michael Grace

It was Sunday evening as I was settling down and reading some of my RSS feeds when one of the articles mentioned Ubiquity. “Ubiquity?”, I thought. “What in the world is Ubiquity besides ‘everywhere’?!?” I headed over to the ubiquity main page and watched the intro video. My wife claims that she saw some drool and heard a few squeals of excitement as I watched the video. Since that time, just over 2 days ago, I haven’t got much sleep and have been writing Ubiquity commands and dreaming of new ways to improve it. ; )

Part of my excitement for Ubiquity is that I started learning a few months ago how to create Firefox add-ons and it was slow going. I have created a dashboard widget for Mac OS X that archives the active browsers web page and then copies the results to the clipboard. The widget uses www.webcitation.org services and is great for taking snapshots in time of pages for reference and citing online work. I never did finish converting my dashboard widget to a Firefox add-on like planned but within a few hours of playing with Ubiquity I had the widget moved over and working sweet.

One other Ubiquity command I want to mention here is one that I did by converting a bookmarklet created by some amazing people over at Kynetx. The command is called “sweetter” and it searches tweets that point to the site that you are currently on. Very cool tool if you are wanting to see what people on Twitter are saying about that site or its services. I would like to improve upon this in the future so that a simpler list of tweets will load in the preview pane without loading the tweets over the page. You’ll have to check it out and try it because I use it all of the time now. ; )

I think there is immense power and potential in being able to write commands for Ubiquity using JavaScript and HTML. As JavaScript and HTML becomes, pardon the pun but, ubiquitous more people will be able to create commands that extend the functionality of the browser while on the web. I am really impressed with the entire setup and I think Mozilla deserves two thumbs up for pioneering the future of the web.

I have several other commands I have written to use and some just for practice, located on my ubiquity page. I will continue to update the scripts as I write new commands and work on improving the web. Would love it if you subscribed to the commands and gave me feedback on what you think.