Remember The Milk

5 Ways to Use Ubiquity for Getting Things Done

Welcome back. You're awesome!

Ubiquity is a new Firefox add-on that attempts to fix problems with the usability of the web. Developers and users alike can extend the web as they see fit. It allows you to control the web using regular language.

With search, you type what you want to find. With Ubiquity, you type what you want to do.

Here are a few ways that this new Firefox add-on can help you get things done and boost your productivity.

Schedule an Appointment

You can easily add an event to your Google Calendar using the add-to-calendar command. Simply describe your task in plain english:

add-to-calendar lunch with Louis and Scoble on Thursday

Check Your Calendar

Make sure you’re available for upcoming events with the check-calendar:

check-calendar thursday

Fire Off an Email

Sometimes I keep Gmail open in case I need to send an email real quick, but that’s no good for staying focused and on task. Ubiquity gives us the email command to make the process easier. Send a quick message by specifying a message and a contact from Gmail:

email Rahsheen is an awesome musician. Check him out. to Diddy

You can also select text and images from the page you’re on and do something like:

email this to Kyle

Add a Task to Remember The Milk

Being somewhat of a Remember The Milk fanatic, the first thing I looked for was a way to add tasks to my list. Google led me to this command:

rtm Finish mixing new song

Send a Message on Twitter

It’s possible that some people use Twitter to accomplish things besides broadcasting when they create a new blog post. For those people, you can use Ubiquity to send a tweet like this:

twitter I just ate a mango

Tying it All Together

Visit Mozilla Labs for an Introduction to Ubiquity. I recommend watching the video first. It doesn’t really make sense until you see it in action.

All of the commands above are included with Ubiquity except for the Remember The Milk command, which you can find in the Ubiquity Wiki. You’ll also find a plethora of other commands for your perusal.

Installing new commands is as simple as visiting a web page once you have the add-on installed.

Are you already using Ubiquity to increase your productivity? Tell me about it.

Give Your Pidgin More Bite With Snarl

I recently noticed a shared item from Google Reader in my FriendFeed that I hoped would solve a major issue I’ve had with keeping up with things. I have Remember The Milk for storing my To Do items and Google Calendar for keeping track of dated events. I even have a slick method for capturing events and items via my desktop launcher. I should be on top of things. But there is a piece missing.

Google Calendar allows alerts via Email, Pop-ups, and SMS. This should work out great, except that I don’t have SMS right now, I don’t keep GCal open, and I don’t have a method to notify me of new mail on my desktop. I have Remember The Milk set up to notify me via Google Talk of upcoming items, but there is still a chance I may ignore the new chat window (sometimes I get a little caught up in FriendFeed).

Snarl, in combination with Pidgin, actually provides me the best solution. I always have Pidgin running to handle various communications needs (Yahoo/AIM/GTalk/IRC/Jabber), so it makes perfect sense for my notifications system to center around it.

All I had to do was:

• Install Snarl
• Install the Snarl Extension for Pidgin, PidginSnarl
• Make sure my GTalk Account in Pidgin was set for Email Notifications
• And enjoy the Snarly goodness!

Here is a screenshot of the types of notifications I get from Pidgin now:

As you can see, I now receive notifications about new email messages, including reminders of how many new emails I have. As an added benefit, I can monitor Identi.ca and other messaging services without actually switching to the Pidgin window.

This means I spend more time on task and doing what I should be doing, and less time playin on Identi.ca. I no longer miss those important podcasts I keep adding to my calendar because I’ll get a desktop notification. I will also recieve new IM’s from Remember The Milk directly to my desktop.

Don’t forget to check out the other extensions available at the Snarl homepage (FireSnarl, for instance).

Did I explain this poorly? Do you have any experience with Snarl or Pidgin that you would like to share? How do you handle notifications to make sure you don’t miss things?

Remember The Milk: Adding Tags While Sending Tasks

In my post, Remember The Milk: Posting Directly from Your Desktop, we covered how to add items to Remember The Milk using the popular desktop launcher Launchy. This provides us with a lightning-quick way to capture tasks and ideas without interrupting whatever we may currently be working on.

With a simple tweak, we can actually make this setup just a little more useful by allowing us to add tags to the items we are sending to RTM.

Here is the command-line we are currently using for “blat” to email RTM:

- -body ” ” -subject “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099

We are using “$$” here to tell the Launchy Runner plugin to pass our first argument as the subject of the email. What we need to be able to do is to specify a second argument that can be passed as the body of the email:

- -subject “$$” -body “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099

Notice that we have:

• Swapped the positions of the “subject” and “body” options
• We are now passing another “$$” to the “body” option

This tells Launchy to use the first argument we send as the subject and the second argument as the body. Now, we can set tags for our tasks as we add them via Launchy:

Pressing the TAB key within Launchy separates the “rtm” command from it’s two arguments. The first argument is the name of the task, and the second are the additional options describing that task.

Keep in mind that we have the choice to set other options for the task besides the tags. You can view the details in the Remember The Milk FAQ on Sending Tasks via Email.

The one caveat here is that you may only specify one option as Launchy doesn’t allow us to enter a line-break.

Was this article helpful? Do you have a better way to do this? I would love to hear from you.