If the Herd was still up (it’s back up now!), you could see that a lot (a majority?) of Ubiquity commands are simply site-specific search commands. And that’s not surprising – search is one of the most common activities on the web (Google’s rich!).
create-new-search-command
What if you could create search commands for any site without writing code and in just a second? Now, you can. Subscribe to this command. Then,
1. Select any searchbox
2. Execute this command
3. And… oh! There’s your command (it even has a icon!)
Go ahead and create searches for Digg, GitHub, BBC or even your own blog. If you need to, you can edit the commands in the command-editor.
Thanks to Marcello Herreshoff for creating this, I added support for POST forms. Note that this command will not work on search forms where they use Javascript to change the url or something else. Examples: Vimeo, Facebook (which has probably the worst URLs ever.) and Gmail. But the vast majority of sites will work.
create-bookmarklet-command-from
It’s rather easy to create commands from bookmarklets in Ubiquity but it could be easier. If the bookmarklet is not already bookmarked, drag it to your bookmarks toolbar. Then, use this command to convert it. It will suggest all the installed bookmarklets.
You can change the name of the command in the command-editor.
Subscribe to these two commands here. Both these commands will be included in the next release of Ubiquity too.
NOTE: Since the newly created commands are stored in the command editor, it might interfere with your existing command-editor commands. If you have some such problem, pick only the commands you want, click the “Share” button and then, subscribe to it. Now, you can use your command editor again. Thanks Sam! (See Sam Hasler’s comment below).
LOLCODE?
In the future, it should be possible to write complicated Ubiquity commands using Lilyapp or a interface like Yahoo! Pipes. I’d also love to code commands in Brainfuck and LOLCODE. Any other suggestions?
7 Comments
February 12, 2009 at 10:19 am
AWESOME!
February 12, 2009 at 10:45 am
I think it’s worth mentioning that these new commands are added to the end of whatever is in the command editor page’s textarea, so if there’s a syntax error in it none of the bookmarklet commands will work, and if you want to store them permanently you’ll have to save them.
The command editor has some weird bug where it duplicates part of what’s inside it every time you interact with it. It didn’t like some of my bookmarklets. (Unchecking the “Enable syntax highlighting” checkbox stops it from happening.)
February 12, 2009 at 11:33 am
Sweet! My girlfriend was looking for this functionality- I will do some cheap usability testing this week!
February 12, 2009 at 7:18 pm
FYI, the Herd is back online as of today!
February 16, 2009 at 5:22 am
How does Ubiquity compare to IE8 Web Slices and Accelerators?
February 18, 2009 at 6:38 am
Hm, I still think that using the OpenSearch plugins is the right way to go here. Instead of a different command for every site (added separately from OpenSearch plugins), you would have one command that manages every site you want to search.
I wrote about this on my blog: http://andrewski.net/2008/12/ubiquitous-search/
The only outstanding problem at this point is that it requires an extension to be able to add OpenSearch plugins to Firefox for arbitrary sites. This command seems to tackle that, but in a different way.
April 6, 2009 at 2:30 am
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