Mozilla Ubiquity

I tried it out, and well … at first I twittered that it was cool, but nothing really sparked my interest about it until I decided to run EVERYTHING I did for a couple of hours through it.

Before I get too far ahead of myself…

What is Ubiquity?

Ubiquity is a new Mozilla Labs add-on for Firefox. The add on lets you interact with the web in a way that’s completely “not normal” feeling in any way, shape or form. After you install the app you can hit ‘CTRL + SPACE’ and then start typing like you would normally (sort of).

Download it here

This is best explained by an example:

Hit CTRL + Space, then type “weather Bronx, Ny” (Have to check to see how the family has it compared to us!)

And we get…

Hmm… very snazzy.

Ok, lets try something else.

How about looking up the wikipedia entry on “dependency injection”.

(either delete the command, or hit ESC to close)

CLTRL + SPACE, then type wikipedia

And we get:

Hmm.. very nice.

Emailing someone:

Hitting [ENTER] opens GMAIL (for me) and it looks like this:

 

Nice.

My Favorites

I love the weather one (as shown above) but I also love the “define” and “translate”. I’m always wondering what some word that some english ninja used on some writing blog meant, this enables me to look up the word quickly. I’m also into learning other languages (not booger-eater dork-geek languages, real human languages) so it helps in translation. key word: HELPS.

Define:

Translate:

 

 

Possible Enhancements

Lets face it man, this is a 0.1 version product. Its very rough right now. There are many things that I could list here, but I’ve decided to trim it down to one. Ubiquity needs to provide the users with some feedback about what’s going on. During my wikipedia search above, the screen sat still for 30 seconds saying “searing wikipedia”. When translating, the translation said ‘replaces the selected text with the german translation’ for about 20 seconds. I had no idea what was going on, if any thing was going on. I was able to tell that something WAS happening when I moved my cursor over the Ubiquity window and it changed to vista spinny clock thingy (super technical term, like it, dont ya!).

Its going to be interesting to see where this goes. Thus far its looking fairly promising. This is nothing that will change my life, but it might make it easier at times when I’m running in FF all day.