New Commands for 0.6

[Jono]

Hi everybody,
For Ubiquity 0.6 we want to include a whole bunch of new useful
commands in the standard feeds. Let's talk about what should be
included. I'd like to finalize the list of commands this week.

Commands that I would be really excited to have added are:
- Go to (url) (where url uses a nountype based on your awesomebar,
so it completes to URLs just like if you had typed into the
awesomebar.)
- Insert (url) (using the same nountype. I insert links into email
a lot, and I always have to open a new tab to figure out the right
URL, then copy and paste it. This command would save me a lot of
time.)
- Find (text) (Searches across all tabs for the given text, so can be
used as a way to switch to a tab by content. Sort of like the "Leap"
command described in The Humane Interface. I would use this all the
time.)
- Google (text) in this site (Uses google search-in-site with the
domain of the current page. I would use this a lot too. I believe
there's a third-party implementation that does this; we should
approach the author about incorporating it.)

I also think we should look at expanding the search commands to cover
more international sites -- not just English-language sites. For
example, I think we ought to include popular Chinese sites like Baidu,
Taobao, and Youku. This is another way of reaching out to a more
international audience, and complements our localization strategy.

Beyond that, Heather has pointed out that the 3rd party commands for
interfacing with Facebook are very popular and might be worth
uplifting into the standard social feed. Heather, are there others
that you know of too?

I started a thread on my blog to ask about people's favorite 3rd-party
commands. It's here:
http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/your-favorite-3rd-party-ubiquity-commands/
One person mentions a command called TextToLink which he thinks ought
to be built-in.

Finally, there was some discussion of image-editing commands during
the last ubiquity weekly meeting, but that's another can of worms that
I'd like to cover in a separate topic.

Please share your suggestions for more commands to add in 0.6!
--Jono

[Heather]

I think the commands you suggested (go, insert, find, site search) are
great.

Here is the third party site-search. It's not updated for 0.5 yet,
but it's a fairly easy command to update.

http://hondje.mine.nu/ubiquity/?get=google-site-search

I think the others we should strongly consider for uplift:
1. Share on Facebook (which should be easy enough to construct from
this bookmarklet: http://www.facebook.com/share_options.php)
2. Insert contact - this is an example in the command developer
tutorial, but it was the first command I wrote for myself and a
frequently requested one.
3. Ping.fm http://maloki.net/projects/pingfm-ubiquity/
4. bit.ly

I'd also like to discuss the possibility of having a mechanism to
configure commands. Some commands (amazon search, ping.fm, skype,
google voice) would benefit from customization beyond just
localization. For example, people have frequently requested the
ability to seach amazon.co.uk instead of amazon.com. Ping FM requires
an ID key to work correctly. I have a skype command that's fairly
cool but is hardcoded to prepend +1 to the numbers because I'm in the
U.S. I think this is a feature that might be really nice for the end
user, although it might add complexity to the command API.

Heather

> commands.  It's here:http://jonoscript.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/your-favorite-3rd-party-ub...

["mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)"]

> I'd also like to discuss the possibility of having a mechanism to
> configure commands. Some commands (amazon search, ping.fm, skype,
> google voice) would benefit from customization beyond just
> localization. For example, people have frequently requested the
> ability to seach amazon.co.uk instead of amazon.com. Ping FM requires
> an ID key to work correctly. I have a skype command that's fairly
> cool but is hardcoded to prepend +1 to the numbers because I'm in the
> U.S. I think this is a feature that might be really nice for the end
> user, although it might add complexity to the command API.

You bring up a really good point, Heather. Perhaps we could let
commands specify some user-definable settings of different kinds with
some metadata, and we could aggregate them into a new settings page
with these options or show them under the commands on the command list.

mitcho

--
mitcho (Michael 芳貴 Erlewine)
mit...@mitcho.com
http://mitcho.com/
linguist, coder, teacher