Forecasting Ubiquity
Posted on August 28, 2008
Recently the Ubiquity extension for Firefox has been making quite a splash. I usually find the extensions developed by Mozilla Labs to be a little obtuse, but admittedly many of them serve market segments I am just not a part of. I thought Ubiquity was pretty impressive looking though, so I took it for a spin. After using it for a little while I tried to decide on some command I could come up with easily, but would still be useful. I realized that the weather command only covered the current conditions, but not the extended forecast. With that in mind I threw together a little command myself.
Forecast grabs the extended forecast from wunderground in either Fahrenheit or Celsius and displays it in the Ubiquity notification area. I am by no means a JavaScript master, so I’m sure there is still room for optimization, but things are still fairly snappy and the functionality is pretty much all there. I was surprised at how easy it was to develop, and all the stumbling blocks I ran into were related to my own JavaScript abilities. I’m mulling over what to develop next, which is probably a good sign for the future if someone as inexperienced as me is still excited about making new commands.
If you end up using forecast, let me know about any issues you run into or any improvements you’d like to see. Also if you are making any new commands drop me a note and show me what you’ve come up with.
Mishail
On September 1, 2008 at 07:09
Hi,
Thanxalot for the great command. One suggestion though. Is possible for forecast to automatically select units (F or C) based on location as it done in built-in weather command (see /ubiquity/chrome/content/builtincmds.js)
bradlby
On September 1, 2008 at 09:13
That’s a good point, I’ve updated the command now so that it automatically sets the temperature units based on your geolocation. You can still specify “in c” or “in f” if you are curious about the other measurement.
Good suggestion!