7 things you should do with Ubiquity instead
The days of the traditional web where we have to “go” somewhere to do something are ending. Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs project that is a bit like a command-line for the web. It is powerful because it allows you to use a bunch of common web-tools without leaving the pages you actually care to visit.
One really cool thing about Ubiquity is that you don’t have to type “add-to-calendar blah blah”. If you type “add”, Ubiquity will figure out what you want so you just have to type: “add beer with David Walsh at 9pm” and it will figure it out. If you have text selected, just type “this” and it will insert the selected text into that part of the command.
Get started with Ubiquity
While using Firefox, download the Ubiquity Firefox extension. Once you have it, you can install extra commands by clicking any of the command links above. You can summon Ubiquity with Ctrl-Space by default, but this is easily changed. That’s all!
Ubiquity is better to…
- Manage your calendar – Adding an event to your Google Calendar should be painless in every situation. The add-to-calendar and check-calendar commands let you do so easily.
- Update your status – Ubiquity comes with tweet, but you can grab an enhanced tweet command. There are commands for Facebook, FriendFeed, and ping.fm as well.
- Share links A lot of sites provide links so you can share links. If not, though, you can do so easily using the digg (built-in), reddit, stumbleupon, delicious, dzone and other places.
- Shorten URLs – You can shorten links in-line by selecting it and using tinyurl (built-in), is.gd, tr.im and hurl
- Read languages you don’t know – Gone are the days you “go” to Google Translate. Now you just highlight some text on a web page, call up Ubiquity, and type translate this to English (or whatever).
- Manage your to-do list – I use Remember the Milk to manage to-do lists that my whole family can share. Now there’s a remember the milk command so it’s always just a keystroke away.
- Lookup programming APIs – Very often I find myself having to look up available methods or something. This is faster using specific searches like those for the Java API, Pydoc, or jquery. You can also do things like W3C site validation
What next?
- Watch Aza Raskin’s video intro to Ubiquity. Seeing it in action is much cooler than just reading.
- Check out other Ubiquity commands
- Write your own command. Instructions. It’s so easy, I could do it!
Bonus: I wrote you a command :) Here’s a dzone command, since I couldn’t find one out there. Enjoy!
Share your favorite Ubiquity commands in the comments!
Great list!
I love translate and tinyURL. I also use the feedly ubiquity commands to tweet pages, share them on Google Reader or save them for later.
Where can I check out the Feedly Ubiquity command? I seem to be missing it
If I remember right, its built into the Feedly extension. So as long as you have both Feedly and Ubiquity installed, you’ll be able to use the Feedly commands in Ubiquity.