emacsen's journal

[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]

Below are the 1 most recent journal entries recorded in the "emacsen" journal:

August 27th, 2008

07:59 am

The API-enabled web and a better browser
All the cool hipsters have seen Ubiquity- the new Mozilla Labs project.

If you haven't seen the video, you should. The easiest way to explain Ubiquity seems to be that it's command line + firefox command functions + greasemonkey.

If you don't know, firefox can already do simple functions on the command line. You can type "google foo" into the address bar and it'll do a search for you.

Greasemonkey is one of the best tools a programmer can have on the web. I've used it for simple things like making certain web sites at work easier to use. If you spend a significant amount of time in other people's web applications, you may find Greasemonkey can save you some precious sanity points.

Ubiquity appears to take both concepts a step further by making the entire browser aware of itself, and able to not only modify single pages but work with APIs.

It all looked a bit flashy until I thought of a few examples of common tasks I deal with that could be made easier via a command line. For example, why either pull up Remember The Milk or (at home) use Tasque when "rem Return that book to Susan" would work just as well.

I briefly read the tutorial on making a new vocabulary and it seems relatively straightforward so long as the service APIs you're using are straightforward as well.

One hope I'd have is that something like this becomes standardized enough that local applications have APIs that work with it, or conversely that local applications would have a simple hook into the Ubiquity system that would allow them to share the data in both directions.

I'm leaving for a few days but I guess I'll need to throw Ubiquity on the pile of nifty new tools to look at.

Tags: programming, web

(Leave a comment)