#ubiquity

"In general, using the browser’s run-time as a prototyping environment enables ridiculously fast rapid prototyping. There are no deployment steps to worry about, changes are reflected instantly, and all changes are dog-foodable from the get-go. Prototyping is also entirely decoupled and parallelizable: that’s especially powerful when you don’t have access to the site for which you are making a live-patch, the backend code is obtuse, or when you multiple have competing ideas for changes you’d like to make. We actually use the same technique for prototyping new behaviors for the the Ubiquity code repository."

"Basically fern’s code generates a list of URL’s which are available as nouns to Ubiquity and Ubiquity displays them as suggestions."

Jono designing synonyms for Ubiquity using interactive fiction and self-photos.

"Skinning Ubiquity is easy; Firefox supports CSS3, which also adds a great number of features to make styling dependent on CSS alone easier. "

"Ubiquity is a graphical keyboard user interface. But a lot of people are missing the graphical aspect of it. And that is precisely what makes Ubiquity different from a command line. Command icons help but previews have to be more visual, not just the plain text that you would normally expect from the terminal. I can’t emphasize enough the fact that previews must be graphical because after all, Ubiquity is a GUI."

"I believe in tough love for my brain-children. It’s report card time. Let’s see how Ubiquity 0.1.1 holds up to my exacting standards."

"In a lot of ways I see Ubiquity as being a solid replacement for Greasemonkey and bookmarklets. It's far simpler and will make their execution much more flexible. I'll be curious to see what people end up doing with it, in the upcoming months."

This page houses my experiments in creating Mozilla Labs Ubiquity commands. Feel free to subscribe to them, and hopefully I won't hose your browser. Oh yeah, and the first command posts to delicious.

The great power of Ubiquity—from a developer standpoint—is how easy it is to create commands. With only a couple of lines of Javascript, Ubiquity enables even casual web developers to drastically enhance the features of the browser. From an 8-line command to insert a contact's email address in any text field, to a 50-line Twitter integration, this tutorial walks you through the process of being generative with Ubiquity.