Today I came across the most interesting announcement from Mozilla’s Aza Raskin: Ubiquity 0.1 alpha is out. That means I have a new toy to play with!
Ubiquity is an add-on for the Firefox browser that enables the user to interact with content like never before; contextual fragments of a webpage can be translated, sent by email, looked up with Google Maps, searched with by wikipedia, youtube, flickr and so much more. I suggest you watch the video!
As with every other new toy, I started playing with it right away and I immediately fell in love with the ‘email’ command. I could simply select some text, do ALT+SPACE, type ‘email this to ruben’, hit ENTER and go! It automatically fires up GMail, sets subject, to-address, body text and the only thing left to do is press ‘Send’.
Problem: I do like GMail, but I use it only for emergencies. When ALL my other mailboxes are unavailable, which happens, like…never. So I rolled my own little Ubiquity command called ‘mail’ that does the exact same thing as ‘email’, but uses the standard ‘mailto:’ interface to access your desktop email client.
Problem: it doesn’t support HTML mail, thus no fancy content like images and hyperlinks. I guess I could add a couple of regular expressions that parse the body text for links and replaces images with BBCode-like placeholders - [img src=http://path.to/image.jpg]. I’ll do that upon request, ok?
This is only a very simple, first tryout of what I could do with this Ubiquity alpha. There’s probably more to come, so check up on me regularly when you’re interested.
Enjoy!
Awesome… I’m using this but I made two little changes in order to work with my google apps email. Instead of closing the new tab I focus it and instead of using noun_type_contact I use just text… I know it’s not the best way but it works for me now…
Thanks for sharing this.
I’m having a slight issue with the mail command. I’m using Outlook 2003 it opens Outlook inserts the text but does not insert the email address. I’ve tried “mail this to friend” I’ve tried “mail this to friend@friend.com” it just puts the person to mail to below the selected web text.
@jesús: for GMail, yours would be the best approach… noun_type_contact apparently attempts a search through your local address book, which works fantastically well for Mail.app or Outlook, but not for GMail at all.
@Zak: I’ll try to change the script so that it will revert back to what you typed after ‘to’ literally instead of trying to find the contact in some address book/ contacts list. That way you’ll always have an email address to send the message to.
Thanks for your comments, guys! I’m happy you find this useful.
@Zak: You have to modifie the line:
modifiers: {to: noun_type_contact}
with
modifiers: {to: noun_arb_text}
hey mike, i’m having the same problem as zak. any chance you’d be willing to share the script (i neglected to copy it when i got the big subscribe warning sign)? it would be fun to play around with.
thanks for making it!
Hey, what hapened with Zomm media gallery. http://www.zoomfactory.org
I need the ultimate version.
Please contact me.
Bye.
(excuseme by my english, is very bad)
Hi,
the link to your Ubiquity mail command seems to be broken. Can you fix it? Thank you,
hamen
I trust you and it also certainly going to help lot of people.
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