Some newbie feedback & BBC iPlayer commands

[Stephen Elson]

Hi,

I heard about Ubiquity last week and had great fun hacking some
commands together over the last few days. I think Ubiquity is one of
the most interesting concepts I've seen in the browser world for a
while, and I found the ease with which I could get started a real
plus. My hearty thanks to everyone involved :-)

I have created some commands for finding and watching/listening to
recent programmes on BBC iPlayer. It's quite rough at the moment, but
i have a few ideas about how to make it better. The feed URL is below,
i'd be very happy to hear feedback, bug reports etc.

http://github.com/elson/ubiquity-bbc-iplayer/wikis/command-feed

As someone who can write JS but is completely new to Ubiquity, there
are couple of things I'd suggest that might make it easier for other
such noobs.

1. Provide some API docs for the various built-in utilities (CmdUtils,
etc) - the tutorial mentions a few of the available methods, but some
auto-generated API docs would really help as people are probably
missing out on lots of useful features. I'm a big fan of JSDoc
Toolkit, it's templatable and written in JS so should fit into your
build systems easy enough.
In the short term just link to the source files for these, the
builtincmds.js and nountypes.js links in the tutorial are currently
dead (I tried to fix them but wasn't sure which files were the correct
one, i'll keep looking).
2. Provide a public command feed parser for the Herd - I subscribed to
the Herd and my feed is showing but the commands are not listed, only
the feed URL. Looking into it it seems that the Herd parser doesn't
like my feed for some reason. A form to test arbitrary feeds against
the parser might help people get their commands working nicely with
the Herd.

I've rambled on enough now, so I'll just say thanks again to the
Ubiiquity team and everyone else involved :-)

[Abimanyu Raja]

Thanks for your suggestions. We've been planning to have docs on the built-in utilities. See http://labs.toolness.com/trac/ticket/108.

- Abi

2009/1/3 Stephen Elson <stephe...@gmail.com>

[Stephen Elson]

Thanks Abi, looks like you've already got the docs in hand :-)

I would add a +1 for JSDoc Toolkit, I have used both NaturalDocs and
JSDoc (the original) in the past, and JSDoc toolkit is far superior
for this type of project. The big advantage in my eyes is that it's
written in JavaScript and is very easy to customise/extend to suit
your particular requirements. If you don't like javadoc style tags
then you won't be happy, but I find them OK. Haven't used JGrouseDoc
so can't comment on that.

Thanks again,
Steve

On Jan 4, 6:02 am, "Abimanyu Raja" <abimanyur...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks for your suggestions. We've been planning to have docs on the

> built-in utilities. Seehttp://labs.toolness.com/trac/ticket/108.
>
> - Abi
>
> 2009/1/3 Stephen Elson <stephen.el...@gmail.com>