Jono DiCarlo's dashboard

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 18, 2008 23:02 to the question "how to email a picture in the webpage by Ubiquity?" in Mozilla:

Context-sensitive menu for pictures/flash/etc. is a wonderful thing and I hope we can do it someday.

A screenshot command has been requested several times; I hope someone in the community will implement it (and if they already have, I hope they'll post the link...) There's a function in cmdutils.js called CmdUtils.getWindowSnapshot() that may be useful.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 18, 2008 22:59 to the question "How to give a Long number a "Nickname" in Ubiquity" in Mozilla:

By the way, documentation for creating a custom nountype is here:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquit...

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 18, 2008 22:57 to the question "Localized versions. Attractive and easier for users" in Mozilla:

Souli: I wrote a Japanese version of the parser, and localized a couple of commands, as a proof-of-concept. The code for it can be found in ubiquity/chrome/content/nlparser/jp. Unfortunately it has been broken by recent changes to the core logic.

We understand how vital localization is; I'm working on a localization API that will make it easy for community members to localize Ubiq. to their own languages. I'm going to be putting a blog post about this up on http://jonoscript.wordpress.com sometime soon. A first version of the localization API will appear in release 0.1.3 or maybe 0.1.4. If you can hang on until then, I'll be able to provide some documentation and assistance for would-be localizers.

Thanks so much for the international interest!

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 18, 2008 22:49 to the question "some commands dont appear in the herd" in Mozilla:

Hi Timofei,
In order for The Herd to index a command, there has to be at least one person who is 1. subscribed to the feed containing the command, AND 2. subscribed to the feed for The Herd itself. Double-check that you're subscribed to your own command feed AND subscribed to The Herd feed, and then see if your command doesn't appear on The Herd page.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 18, 2008 22:45 to the question "Add picture to email" in Mozilla:

There isn't a command to do this yet.

But someone could pretty easily write a command for it, since assuming the mail is html-enabled, this is just a matter of inserting an tag.

Anyone want to write one and post a link to it here?

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 17, 2008 20:17 to the problem "Quoted contact names not handled properly" in Mozilla:

Thanks for pointing this out. I'll file a bug for it.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 16, 2008 22:14 to the question "Ubiquity + IE Tab = broken?" in Mozilla:

Since Ubiquity doesn't work in IE, I'm not surprised to hear that it doesn't work in IE Tab either.

Does the problem go away when you switch back to a non-IE tab, or is Ubiquity broken until you restart the browser?

Jono DiCarlo started following the idea "Make Ubiquity show Internet expressions e.g. FTW is "For the Win"" in Mozilla.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 16, 2008 22:11 to the idea "Spawning popups for e.g. Google Bookmark from within Ubiquity" in Mozilla:

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I guess I hadn't noticed that Firefox blocks popups from ubiquity because none of the built-in commands open pop-up windows.

Perhaps the easiest solution would be to add some code to your command that checks the preferences, and sets "command" in "dom.allowed_popup_events", before attempting to launch the new window. This is quite possible, since Ubiquity javascript has chrome access, and the Firefox preferences are modifiable through XPCOM. (You can read about how on MDC, here: http://developer.mozilla.org/index.ph... )

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 16, 2008 22:06 to the question "how often does ubiquity update commands when using autoupdate" in Mozilla:

Ubiquity reloads its commands each time it's invoked -- which means each time the user hits alt-space. This could in fact be a server load issue if you're hosting a popular command and lots of people subscribe to it with auto-update.

In case this becomes a problem for command developers in the long-term, we'd welcome any suggestions about how to deal with it. For example, maybe someday commands could have "cache" or "no-cache" or maybe "time-to-live" metadata on them, which would instruct the ubiquity client whether and how long to cache them.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 16, 2008 22:03 to the question "Command editor does not seem to work" in Mozilla:

Hi Rowanrook,
Try some simpler commands in the command-editor first. Like, just a "hello world" command, and make sure that works. I suspect that the problem is with function chain() and not with your command editor per se. CreateCommand is meant to be called as a top-level function in a command file; calling it from inside another function may not work as intended.

Trying to make a command that chains other commands together.... may be possible, but it's going to be difficult to make it work the way you want. Really, I think this needs to be a core ubiquity feature, not something that's added in a 3rd party command feed.

In fact, we're already working on it. There's a ticket filed for this feature here:
http://labs.toolness.com/trac/ticket/68

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 16, 2008 21:59 to the question "how do I add additional command arguments?" in Mozilla:

Hi Donniel,
I know there are several Del.icio.us commands by various authors floating around the web. It's possible that this one just wasn't implemented very well.

Normally, the arguments to ubiquity commands are delimited by prepositions. (In case you've forgotten your grade-school grammar lessons, those are words like "to", "with", "in", etc.) So e.g. the email command is "email (message) to (contact)", with the word "to" identifying the second argument. Normally when you start entering a command, you'll see the arguments in the suggestion list -- for instance if I type "email", I see "email (message) (to contact)" in the suggestion list, which gives me a clue that I would use the word "to".

If the suggestion list says delcious (description)(tags), with no preposition, then the command author probably made a mistake and forgot to specify a preposition, which would make the second argument unusable. That's a bummer!

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 10, 2008 07:44 to the question "How to give a Long number a "Nickname" in Ubiquity" in Mozilla:

Hi Nicolas,
Mapping of names to phone numbers would be better done as a custom nounType. Then you can have a very simple command that just uses the nounType for its argument. This is how the email contact list works -- it's noun_type_contact, defined in nountypes.js.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 03, 2008 15:54 to the problem "Declaring 'Block' variable in Javascript" in Mozilla:

Really?

This is in javascript that's in a page?
I'm very very surprised that Ubiquity would interfere with that, since all the Ubiquity javascript is running in chrome, not in content. It should be entirely separate from anything in the page.

And the transparent overlay is a separate window object, so it shouldn't interfere with anything in the page either.

I don't know what could be going on. If you have a page up with this Block variable, could you please post a link to it here, so that we can load it up and see if we get the same problem with Ubiquity installed / don't get it with Ubiquity uninstalled ?

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 03, 2008 15:50 to the problem "Content from domain "mail.google.com" cannot be sent via the email command ("gmonkey is undefined" exception)." in Mozilla:

I think this bug has already been reported, here:
http://getsatisfaction.com/mozilla/to...

There's a lot of discussion over in that thread about possible causes and workarounds. Some if it might be helpful to you.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 03, 2008 15:49 to the problem "ubiquity says gmonkey is undefined when attempting to email a picture" in Mozilla:

There are a lot of bugs with the email command that we're working to fix for upcoming versions.

By the way, to be perfectly clear, the variable name "gmonkey" does NOT indicate that you need to have greasemonkey installed -- you don't need it at all. It's a variable that's included in the GMail page for use by gmonkey scripts, and Ubiquity takes advantage of it since it's there.

Thanks everybody who reported their experiences with this bug -- the info will be very helpful to have when we're trying to debug it.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 03, 2008 15:45 to the question "calculate gives an error when the numerator is zero" in Mozilla:

Blipo, don't tease the nice people who come here for help.

Shripathi: Thanks for reporting this bug. I just tried it and I can definitely duplicate it. The real problem is that our implementation of the calculate command is incredibly naiive and probably needs to be rewritten from scratch.

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 03, 2008 15:43 to the idea "Ubiquity suggestions with respect to Launchy." in Mozilla:

We have a ton of parser improvements in the works for Ubiquity 0.1.2, including learning from your chosen completions and recognizing commands from any part of the name.

I definitely like the idea of integrating launchy and ubiquity!

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 03, 2008 15:41 to the question "Email to multiple addresses" in Mozilla:

Ubiquity doesn't support it yet.
The closest thing that currently works is to "email this to joe" and then once the window opens, add sam to the TO: field.

We're getting a ton of feature requests for the email command! I guess it's really popular. I just hope we don't have to end up re-implementing Thunderbird inside of Ubiquity...

Jono DiCarlo replied on September 03, 2008 15:39 to the problem "Can't right click (context menu) on results to get to copy." in Mozilla:

By "ubiquity results" you mean the stuff in the preview pane?

There should certainly be some way to get stuff from the preview pane into a document. So far we've been doing this an ad-hoc way (like "insert map in page" for the map command) but it would be better to have a method which works for any command preview.

So, thanks a lot for your suggestion.