Twittering with Ubiquity

Although Firefox Ubiquity was released in August last year, it was only a couple of weeks ago that I really had a chance to look at it. It is kinda difficult to explain what Ubiquity is, so I will not. Instead, I recommend you watch this video. Ubiquity can be installed from here.

Mozilla has a lot of great documentation on how to use and extend Ubiquity commands. I would recommend you start from this page.

This post deals with posting 'tweets' with Ubiquity.

• Posting a regular text twitter: This is pretty straight-forward, you just bring up Ubiquity and type twitter and whatever message you want to post.
• Posting a selection: Select a section of text, bring up Ubiquity and type twitter. Your selection will make up the twitter content.

But I wanted more. I wanted to tweet about the song I am currently listening to. So, I hacked together a Ubiquity command for it. Paste the following in the command editor window (ubiquity command: command-editor)

/*
Post Current Song To Twitter
*/

const TWITTER_STATUS_MAXLEN = 160;

CmdUtils.CreateCommand({
name:"tweet-song",
_getSong: function() {
var trackData = window.foxytunesGetCurrentTrackData();
return CmdUtils.makeSugg("'" + trackData.title + "' by " + trackData.artist);
},

preview:function(previewBlock) {
var song = this._getSong();
var previewTemplate = "Updates your Twitter status to:
" +
 "I am listening to ${status}

" +
 "Characters remaining: ${chars}";

var truncateTemplate = "
The last ${truncate} " +
 "characters will be truncated.";

var previewData = {
status: song.text,
chars: TWITTER_STATUS_MAXLEN - song.text.length
};

var previewHTML = CmdUtils.renderTemplate(previewTemplate, previewData);

if (previewData.chars < 0) {
var truncateData = {
 truncate: 0 - previewData.chars
};
previewHTML += CmdUtils.renderTemplate(truncateTemplate, truncateData);
}
previewBlock.innerHTML = previewHTML;
},

execute:function() {
var statusText = this._getSong();
if (statusText.chars < 0) {
displayMessage("Twitter requires a status to be entered");
return;
}
var updateUrl = "https://twitter.com/statuses/update.json";
var updateParams = {
source: "ubiquity",
status: "I am listening to " + statusText.text
};

jQuery.ajax({
type:"POST",
url: updateUrl,
data: updateParams,
dataType: "json",
error:function() {
 displayMessage("Twitter error - status not updated");
},
success:function() {
 displayMessage("Twitter status updated.");
}
});
}
});

You will also need to install FoxyTunes to get this command to work. That is it.

Start up a song in iTunes or any other supported player, bring up Ubiquity and type 'tweet-song' and hit enter to post a tweet that looks like 'I am listening to 'Alex Gopher With Demon Presen' by Jazz Boutique (CD Series)' (Note: You may have to login with your twitter account for this to work).

Credits: The tweet-song code is based on work by Blair McBride (twitter command) and Abimanyu Raja (get-lyrics command).