It’s been a little while since i first wrote about Ubiquity. That’s partly because it’s a little difficult to get into the Ubiquity frame of mind. It makes things much easier to do, but you do have to get yourself into the habit of using it, instead of going about the “old ways” which generally take longer. It also helps if there’s a script written for that thing you want to do.

I found once such script the other day. PurpleFloyd’s Screengrab script for Ubiquity is no doubt the simplest way to capture images of entire web pages. Cmd Shift 3/4 is great for quick snaps of the whole screen or cropped portions on Macs [thanks, Mark], but if you have to scroll and can’t get the whole page in one shot, this is the way to go. Just subscribe to the screengrab script, and that’s it. No extensions to install, no new buttons or key combos; it just works using capabilities already built into Firefox. Just fire Ubiquity and type: screengrab.

I did run into a few slight issues while trying it out. First, if you save to a file, it sticks a PNG image in your Temporary folder (on Macs that’s: ~/Library/Caches/TemporaryItems/, on Windows: Documents and SettingsUSERLocal SettingsTemp) — not the most deft location. Took me a minute to figure out where my new images landed; Desktop or maybe Documents would make more sense. When i first tried it, the script struggled on some pages with CSS layouts and didn’t capture the entire document, but that seems to have been reosolved. The other command that copies the image to the clipboard (instead of saving a file) only pastes into rich text edit boxes in Firefox, such as a Gmail compose window or perhaps your blog writing screen, and not into external image editors like Photoshop.

I can’t wait to discover more interesting ways to use Ubiquity. Please comment with your favorite Ubiquity commands.