It’s time to start improving the built-in Ubiquity commands! Since the launch of Ubiquity last August, huge improvements have been made. But most of these new changes haven’t improved the commands in any way. Aside from a few bug fixes, the “wikipedia” command, the “twitter” command and others are still the same as they were back in August.
Since the core developers have been working hard on Ubiquity core, Aza suggested starting weekly focuses so that everyone can concentrate their efforts on a single command for a week or two.
We’ll start with the email commands (email, last-email, get-email-address, detect-email-provider) for the first two weeks.
The most important objective is to be enable the email command to be used with other service providers like:
- Windows Live Hotmail – has an API to retrieve contacts
- Yahoo! – has one API to retrieve contacts and one to compose messages
- Google Apps
- Thunderbird
- Default mailto: application (e.g. Mail.app on a mac) – should work similar to this command
- Others like AOL, Zimbra, LinkedIn contacts, etc.
With the addition of these different providers, the new command would have a additional modifier “using”:
The default email provider will be based on your browsing history – the email account with the highest frecency (see the detect-email-provider command). But you can change your default by simply telling Ubiquity “my email is yahoo”.
As with any other command, another major goal here is to fix all tickets related to this command (click image to get to Trac).
How you can help
- Suggest improvements to the email commands
- Submit patches to fix any of the open tickets or to add your favorite feature!
- Write a comprehensive unit test framework for commands that will ensure that errors in commands are detected quickly.
- If you are a designer, you write can CSS for Ubiquity. How about making this bland preview look awesome?
The current email command code can be found here and the code for the contacts noun is here. To get this command, you can install the latest beta version of Ubiquity here. As more changes and features are added, it should update itself (not nightly but frequently). If you want to contribute patches, here’s the guide to help with that.
Progress
UPDATE: Emailing using your Google Apps account now works thanks to Jeremy Laidman’s work.
I’ve already integrated Yahoo! and Google Apps contacts. But it does not seem to be possible to send emails from Yahoo! like we do in Gmail (do you know how to do that?). I’ll be blogging about the progress as it happens.
Let’s perfect the email commands in the next two weeks!
After that, we’ll look at the Twitter command (timelines, replies and more!).
13 Comments
February 5, 2009 at 2:21 am
As far as i know send email is available for only premium users. Really frustrating…!! Don’t know how they survive.
February 5, 2009 at 7:13 am
@Jigar Shah You’re talking about Yahoo! Mail?
February 5, 2009 at 2:36 pm
[...] details of how to participate, head over to Abi’s blog, who is leading the [...]
February 5, 2009 at 2:41 pm
Hey Abi, Sorry to be a bit thick, but how do I subscribe to that new email command?
February 5, 2009 at 10:25 pm
@Ryan My bad – should have included that in my original post. Edited it now.
To get this command, you can install the latest beta version of Ubiquity here[1]. As more changes and features are added, it should update itself (not nightly but frequently). If you want to contribute patches, here’s the guide to help with that[2].
[1] https://ubiquity.mozilla.com/xpi/ubiquity-latest-beta.xpi
[2] https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_Development_Tutorial
February 6, 2009 at 5:11 am
@Abi yes. Its for premium account only.
February 7, 2009 at 12:46 pm
Final confirmation..
http://developer.yahoo.com/mail/account_types.html
No sending email through API. Don’t know if they support uri based solution.
February 7, 2009 at 9:06 pm
Hi,
i have suggestion for you rather than using notion of default mail provier only is not that much user frndly. Instead of that introduce from field it will show list of all email providers. User will choose account. If he want to use default provider then he will skip from field.
February 9, 2009 at 8:09 am
SOUNDS GOOD!
February 10, 2009 at 10:09 am
how to send a webpage link to multiple users ?
i tried : email “somename” and, email “somename” ,
but no help….
February 25, 2009 at 3:41 am
@Jigar Shah Thanks for finding out! That kinda sucks… but at least, we can get the contacts out.
@deepak Command chaining using “and” is not possible at the moment and neither is emailing multiple users at the same time. We’ll see if we can add it.
@Hrishikesh That’s what we are doing right now. The default email provider is the default i.e. if you don’t type the “using” parameter yourself. If you specify “using” a specific email provider, that will work too.
February 25, 2009 at 3:48 am
i have more suggestions. give me you IM id so that we can discuss those.
July 3, 2009 at 4:46 am
I would like to be able to highlight a portion of a web page and send it to a friend or friends with my own comments without waiting for the mail composition window to open. Can you do it now? I don’t know.