Major Ubiquity Update

Chris Beard

19 responses

We are proud to announce Ubiquity 0.1.5. Since the last major update, Ubiquity has gained a sleeker look and a smarter, more stable core. Ubiquity has also gained the ability to be skinned: anyone who knows how to write standards-complaint CSS can now create and share a custom Ubiquity skin.

  • Beautiful: Ubiquity has a new look that increases its visual simplicity and lays the groundwork for full keyboard access.
  • Skinnable: Anyone can now give Ubiquity a new look. It’s as simple as a little bit of CSS. That’s how the new look was created! Once you’ve created a skin, it’s easy to share it with the world: you can subscribe to skins just like you can subscribe to commands.
  • Speed: Ubiquity is now much snappier.
  • Stability: This is the most reliable Ubiquity yet, with much of its internals refactored.
  • Relevancy: Ubiquity now makes it easier to issue the commands you want. It remembers the commands you use — using the same technology that powers the Awesome Bar — as well as matching anywhere in a command name.

Download It

If you already have Ubiquity, it will automatically update itself soon (if you are feeling impatient, you can also go to the add-ons manager and click “Find Updates”). If you don’t already have Ubiquity installed, you can get the latest version here.

More Commands and More Documentation

Want to find more Ubiquity commands? Thousands have been written. You can find them at the Ubiquity Herd, as well as conveniently categorized on this wiki page.

If you’d like to write your own commands, take a look at the author tutorial. We’ve also added much better command API documentation.

What’s Next?

We are currently hard at work on Ubiquity 0.2, which is due out soon. You can get the latest beta here. We are also currently working towards a mouse-based edition of Ubiquity.

Thanks

Many people contributed to the code found in Ubiquity 0.1.5. The team particularly wants to thank Yatrik Solanki, Abimanyu Raja, and Stephen Horlander for their work on envisioning and creating the skinning functionality and skins. Thanks also go to Zach Lym for his ongoing work on Ubiquity user testing, and Fernando Takai for his outstanding contributions as a community catalyst.

Get Involved

Home page, Ubiquity News, Report a Bug, Source Code, Mailing List, IRC

We are also currently doing an open-process redesign of the Ubiquity logo. Help decide what it should be!

19 responses

  1. Rob Sutton wrote on :

    The Facebook status update command doesn’t work for me either. But this command was written from some random guy, it wasn’t from the Ubiquity developers. I’m thinking of re-writing it myself if somebody else doesn’t do it soon.

  2. CWJ wrote on :

    Windows XP SP£, Firefox 3.0.7 Ubiquity 0.1.5
    Ubiquity doesn’t even get out of the starting gate. Absolutely zilch happens on pressing ctrl and spacebar…not impressed.

  3. marc wrote on :

    @Dany same here. Facebook-status command gives me a notifciation, but my FB is not updated. Same for the “tweet” command. What gives? Anyone?

    hit me at marc@dangermarc.com if you figure this out…

  4. Erik wrote on :

    the download link for 0.5 isn’t working, please fix it?

  5. joe wrote on :

    The download link is down. It times out with every try.

  6. jjjnmk wrote on :

    I just updated, but I can’t open the command thing anymore.
    When i press ctrl+space nothing happens. Ahhh what do I do?

  7. scott wrote on :

    @Dany: Same for me – Facebook command, notification, but no status update on FB. FF on linux.

  8. hanns wrote on :

    Ubiquity (and iMacros!) are really useful tools for automating the web browser/web sites. Thanks for creating them!!!

  9. Dany wrote on :

    The Facebook command doesn´t work for me.I can use it in Ubiquity and get a Growl notification that my status was changed but when I go to my Facebook profile the status isn´t changed.I use Firefox on Mac OSX 10.5.6.

  10. robert wrote on :

    Would be great if I didn’t have to install growl for the mac client. It should be an option to have the messages just as pop-ups instead of growl. I use this on multiple operating systems and I don’t have access to install Growl at work(I could but it’s wouldn’t be right).

  11. Antoine Turmel (GeekShadow) wrote on :

    We now have Ubiquity running in Songbird :
    http://addons.songbirdnest.com/addon/1424

  12. Samuel Sidler wrote on :

    The screenshot in this blog post is of http://www.flickr.com/photos/azaraskin/3183425862/ but the link goes to http://www.flickr.com/photos/azaraskin/3102547965/ …

    I like the first link better. 🙂

  13. Shawn wrote on :

    D’oh… In between “like” and “google-image-search” that comment should have the contents of the textarea labeled ‘IFRAME (if iframes are allowed there are a lot of other XSS problems as well):’ from http://ha.ckers.org/xss.html, followed by ” with”

    Please escape rather than strip. It makes it much easier to discuss markup. 🙂

  14. Shawn wrote on :

    Cool! It does look much better, and the growing command list has started making it much more utilitarian for me.

    Quick question. If you highlight something like and check the preview of something like google-image-search, does the script execute in the context of XUL? I tried looking into it a bit, but my ignorance of XUL got in the way. Regardless, it probably shouldn’t execute at all.

  15. Willy wrote on :

    Is there a possibility to tie this to Snarl on Windows like Growl on Mac OS X?

  16. Cory wrote on :

    Update: Did the reset as described in the Troubleshooting section of “about:ubiquity” and all is once again right with the world… Lost a few commands (xkcd…) but it’s a small price to pay to have my beloved ubiquity back.

    little triangles (above the curved corners on the top R/L of the ubiquity bar) are not transparent, kind of funny looking, but otherwise new skin looks great.

    Thanks again for such a great tool!

  17. Cory wrote on :

    After looking over the news about the update, it looks great! I installed it in my browser, it doesn’t work. In spite of hitting CTRL+SPACE numerous times with varied levels of fervor, I get nada. I want my Ubiquity back!

    I tried switching my shortcut key, to no avail.

    My browser is Flock 2.0.3 on Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (32 bit)

    Other than that, keep up the great work! Ubiquity is the greatest add on I have ever used.

  18. lrbabe wrote on :

    standards complaint? Well, I can complain, but I wasn’t aware there is a standard way of doing it…

  19. Thomas wrote on :

    Is there any way to make Ubiquity interface directly from the Awesome Bar, or any chance this will be officially sanctioned at any point in the future? It seems like such a natural place to act as a “command line” for the Internet, especially with Firefox supporting keyword searches.