I’ve updated the “twtplus” command for Ubiquity 0.5+. Since Github Gist sucks right now, (it’s very slow and cuts off the last lines of the code randomly without any prompt) I’m publishing the script here on my blog. Note that this is only compatible with Ubiq 0.5+ now. twtplus.ubiq.js
Mozilla Ubiquity is not only a wonderful command engine and launcher. It can also be used to do stuff what Greasemonkey is good at, manipulating page DOM dynamically, by utilizing the “pageLoad_” function hook. To demonstrate this case I’ve quickly migrated the recently popular Twitter search on Google monkey script onto Ubiquity. You can get the Ubiq version of Twitter+Google search from here.
I retained the original DOM building code, but replaced the Ajax call with a JQuery one along with a couple hacks explained below to get it working from Ubiquity.
First, while Greasemonkey has built-in mechanism for filtering page URLs for selective script invocation, you have to do that on your own with Ubiquity. Look at the first few lines in the Ubiq command for the regex job to filter out Google search addresses.
var href = doc.location.href;
var q = (/^https?:\/\/(?:www\.)?google\..*\/.*[&?]q=([^&]*)(?:&|$)/(href)||0)[1];
Secondly, before publishing the script, you have to put such a line of comment in the script in order for Ubiquity to consider it an installable command and trigger the install bar at the top of the page. (Kudos to satyr for pointing out this hack)
//function cmd_
In similar ways, most of the Greasemonkey scripts can be migrated to Ubiquity.
Earlier this year I spent some time to write the “twtplus” command for Ubiquity, the intriguing Quicksilver-like plugin for Firefox. I’ve been tweaking it intermittently and now I’m gonna put together a little handy reference for it. Twtplus has the following features:
Post message to your twitter account (of course)
Preview your friends timeline. Click avatar to reply.
@ and d message to friends with friends username autocompletion. Notice that “@” is a modifier keyword so you need to leave a space after it to get the friend name autocompletion working.
Use “#url” tag to substitute the URL of the currently viewing page
Automatically shorten all URLs found in a message using http://is.gd
“as” modifier for posting as multiple twitter accounts.
Most of the features are pretty straightforward. Take a look at the following screenshot. Notice the grey hints after the “twtplus” command when you type and you’ll be fine.
twtplus
In order to get multi-account posting working, there are a couple things I’d like to mention. First, due to the way the browser works, if you have a logged in session for Twitter, the browser will ALWAYS post your tweet as the currently logged in user, regardless of the one you specifies with the “as” modifier keyword. Thus the solution is to avoid being logged in via the Twitter web interface, or when the stock “twitter” command prompts you a login dailog. If you visit twitter.com and find that you’ve already logged in, log out explicitly.
Secondly, twtplus looks for your stored usernames and passwords for Twitter in your Firefox password manager, for the login authentication to Twitter and provide multiple account autocompletion suggestions. So you need to store your Twitter accounts with Firefox if you haven’t already. This is also a more secure and convenient way than the stock “twitter” command since you don’t need to input your twitter login from time to time.