Mozilla Ubiquity

Mozilla recently released a very early alpha version of its FireFox extension Ubiquity. It's Mozilla's vision of a new way of using the web, using mashups from various sites integrated into the browser itself through Javascript, and controlled through a keyboard launcher a la Launchy/Quicksilver.



It's an intriguing idea, and the uses are countless, even in such an early version. Ubiquity works by taking a logical sentence powered by verbs, and putting it into action. For example, you could highlight some text on a web-page, hit Ctrl+Space (Ubiquity's shortcut), type in translate this to Russian, then hit Enter, and the text on the page would change to that translation. You can do the same thing with equations by using the calculate keyword.

For Gmail users, you can select an area of text, and use a command like email this to Aneurin to open up a compose page with the relevant information already in there. The TinyURL command will automatically set up a TinyURL for the selected URL. Wiki subject will bring up - in the same box - a list (with summaries) of matching articles on Wikipedia.



But it gets better. The thing's integrated with Google Maps as well, and is set up to find locations near you without you even telling it. Once you've found the right area, click the map and you can edit the viewpoint and zoom, then insert the map itself into, for example, an email message. The Mozilla devs went out of their way to create what should be an incredibly useful feature for Craigslist users (with the intention of doing it for other sites in time) - highlight a list of posts, enter map-these, and a Google Map appears with the location of all of the posts marked.

It's very early days, but Ubiquity looks like doing for FireFox what keyboard launchers have done for the desktop OS, except perhaps on an even bigger scale. I'm not using it much right now to be honest, but I can see that changing once there's a solid core of good commands and software-agnostic ones (e.g. email commands that work in Thunderbird as well as Gmail etc) about.

Tried it out yet? What do you think?

Looks nice, about to install.

Pretty impressive. It can only get better as it gets further into development.

I was reading about it last week, and saw someone comment that it was "the command line for Web 2.0". That struck me as being quite wank.

I'll check it out when it's less very early alpha version.

I'm using it now. Its a brilliant tool. Some great potential there.