Gnome-Do is Pretty Damned Impressive

2009-07-22T14:42:37-07:00

If you’ve talked to me about Ubuntu in the past year or so, I probably mentioned to you that one of my favorite things about using it is a program called gnome-do. It’s a little hard to explain gnome-do without an example, so I’ll explain how I just made the following tweet, sharing a picture from my garden:

Artichoke has finally flowered. It’s quite something: http://tinyurl.com/mn7pjp

To make this tweet, I needed to find the picture on my computer, upload it to the web, create a tinyurl of the picture’s location, and then tweet the URL.

Traditionally, the process would be the following:

Open a web browser
Go to a photo sharing site
Find the upload button, and press it
Browse to the photo on your computer
Upload the photo
Right click the uploaded photo, and select “Copy Link Location”
Go to TinyURL.com, and shorten the URL
Copy the new URL
Go to twitter
Log in if necessary, and write your tweet All in all a rather arduous process. Using gnome-do, the process is rather simpler. Gnome-do operates by allowing you to choose an object (such as a picture, a contact in your address book, an album, etc.), and then perform an action on it (such as upload the picture, write the contact an email, play the selected album, etc.)

In this case, what I had to do was:

Summon gnome-do by pressing Super + Space
Type the first few letters in the name of the picture
Press tab. Type “u” for “upload,” and press enter. This uploads the picture, and tells me its URL at imageshack.com.
Press tab, type “t” to “make a tinyurl” of the picture’s location at imageshack.
Type tab, then “copy” to copy the tinyurl to the clipboard.
Summon gnome-do a second time, and type out my twitter message, paste in the tinyurl, and press tab, then “post to twitter”.

And that’s it. It sounds more complicated than it is. In reality, to make the above tweet, I pressed the following:

Super + Space, Arti, u, enter. This uploaded the photo to imageshack.com, and returned it’s location. Tab, t, enter. This created a tinyurl of the location. Tab, c, enter. This copied the tinyurl to the clipboard. Twitter message, CTRL + V, tab, t. This posted my twitter message.

Clearly, there is a bit of a learning curve, and some configuration that you have to set up so it knows your usernames, but once it is set, it makes such complicated posts much easier to complete. And I should mention, this is only the beginning of what it can do.

Michael Jay Lissner

Gnome-Do is Pretty Damned Impressive