Friday, January 27, 2006

Instant Mashups: The "mash" Command



The mash command is the inverse of the multi command mentioned earlier. Instead of applying several words to a single command, it applies several commands to a single word. In other words, you can create instant mashups.

So for example, you can mash up Google Images, Yahoo Images, and Flickr: mash porsche gim yim flk

Or see how various dictionaries compare: mash antidisestablishmentarianism dic thes a encarta

Here's a combination of Google Maps and Amazon: mash honolulu gmaps am

7 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

These commands (mash & multi) are very cool! But they're so simple and obvios that I'm a little ashamed, how is it possible we didn't have them before?

1/28/2006 6:43 a.m.  
Blogger Jonathan said...

Hi elzr! Heh - it took many people trying things (and fixing things ;-) and pushing the envelope little by little to get to that command!

Funny how the simplest, most elegant things are often not the most obvious :-)

1/28/2006 9:39 a.m.  
Blogger sys.out said...

Very nice!
Thanks

1/28/2006 11:59 a.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You're very right Jon.

And well, talking about incremental improvemnts, wouldn't it be cool if you could join 2 words together using double quotes, a la Flickr? (i.e. mash "porsche 911" gim yim flint) I'm guessing the only thing that'd need a slight tweak is '%'.

1/28/2006 3:16 p.m.  
Blogger Jonathan said...

sys.out - right on!

hi elzr - actually what I do if there are multiple words is join them with dashes e.g. san-francisco. Seems to work for many commands.

1/29/2006 12:41 p.m.  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Been using this command a lot! You should probably mention in the "man" of it that it will accept up to 4. Very cool command!

1/31/2006 2:25 p.m.  
Blogger Jonathan said...

Hi magicjj -- yeah, I had to throttle it back to 4 -- 10 was using up all of YubNub's threads!

1/31/2006 6:58 p.m.  

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