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!
