YubNub is a web app that has been generating a lot of buzz ever since Jon Aquino created it a year ago to win a Ruby on Rails programming contest. If you haven't heard of YubNub (Ewok for "hooray', BTW) it's a "command line for the web". Just like the MS-DOS > prompt or a *nix shell, you type commands into YubNub and wonderful things happen - or not - if you mess up. As the web takes on more and more of the role of an operating system it makes sense that there should be a command line for the web. And it's not just for power users. There are lots of simple, ready to use YubNub commands that do neat things. Here are some examples:
g query <- do a Google search for query
lynx http://yeswap.com <- displays the html source code for yeswap.com
gim daibutsu <- Google Image Search for "Daibutsu"
yt Mickey Mouse <- Search YouTube for "Mickey Mouse"
There are currently over 11,550 commands in YubNub. Fortunately there is a search command "ls"
ls Google <- lists all Google related commands
ls mobile <- lists all mobile related commands
The examples above are all simple, but some YubNub commands are more complex,taking multiple arguments, for example;
xe -amount 100 -from USD -to EUR <- currency conversion of 100 US Dollars to Euros (ouch!).
So how do you know that you have to enter -from and -to and which currency codes you can use? For that there is the "man" (manual) command:
man xe
Which takes you to this helpful description page.
The above examples just scratch the surface, YubNub is really a powerful scripting language with logical operators like ifThen, functions like random and the ability to pipe the output of one command into another. To get up to speed with YubNub, first take a look at Jon Aquino's blog post announcing YubNub. Other good YubNub resources include the YubNub Google Group and Jeremy's Picks which is a good list of essential YubNub commands. I find looking at the code of existing YubNub commands, which is displayed as the first line of the the man command's output, to be a big help in figuring out how to do things in YubNub.
If your still with me at this point, you're probably wondering what this has to do with mobiles? Actually, a lot. While the normal YubNub homepage is at least marginally usable on a phone - especially if you turn off images, there is a better way. There are at least two mobile front ends to YubNub.
Metroblogging's YubNub Mobile, metroblogging.com/yubnub is a mobile-sized YubNub prompt where you can type YubNub commands and view the results. Because the results aren't transcoded and they are not always mobile friendly. You need to limit yourself to mobile specific YubNub commands like:
gmobile url <- returns url transcoded by Google. (There's also skw and iyhy which do the same thing using Skweezer or IYHY.)
blm <- launches Bloglines Mobile
amo query <- searches Mobile Answers.com for query
A really useful pair of
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posted by Dennis Bournique
June 14, 2006 @ 7:51 pm
7 View Comments
