fettig.net

This afternoon I spent a little time playing with Aza Raskin’s new mega-meta-extension for Firefox, Ubiquity. (If you’re not up to speed on Ubiquity yet, imagine bookmarklets, extended with power similar to Greasemonkey (including the ability to control your entire browser window) and controlled with a lovely command line interface in the model of enso/Quicksilver). Unsurprisingly, I love it. Ubiquity makes the web more scriptable then ever before, and the current implementation combines several of my favorite interesting UI ideas (context sensitivity, command lines, and hidden UIs that spring into view when you need them).

As a learning exercise I wrote my first command, status-in-gmail, which you can subscribe to on this Ubiquity Commands page. The status-in-gmail command will update your Google Talk status message in any Gmail tabs you currently have open. You can supply an arbitrary string for your status message, or have it use the selected text on the current page.

I chose this for my first command because I’d written a similar command for Quicksilver and Adium a while ago using AppleScript, and I’ve missed it since I switched to using web-based chat in Gmail. The Ubiquity side of things was really easy to implement - they’ve done a great job providing simple APIs. The only hard part was figuring out how to script Gmail to do what I wanted.

The current code is alpha, of course, and still has some limitations - you can only change your status message, not your available/busy status, and it will throw an error if you try to use it without being signed into chat. But feel free to give it a try and let me know what you think.

Now, who’s going to write the first Quicksilver-to-Ubiquity bridge? :)