A First Look at Mozilla's Ubiquity

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Yous've probably heard of Ubiquity by now. It was causing quite a buzz a few days ago earlier Google Chrome came along and stole all of its thunder.

Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that bills itself every bit "a powerful new manner to interact with the web." One way to describe Ubiquity that gives you a clearer thought of what it'due south actually all about is that information technology's Quicksilver for the Internet.

We're all used to the point-and-click, foreign and unnatural way of interfacing with the web. Ubiquity tries to alter the way we interface with the web past assuasive united states to use linguistic communication rather than buttons and countless URLs. For instance, if I want to post something I see on the web to Twitter, I'd usually have to copy the text, navigate to Twitter, log in, paste the text and printing submit. With Ubiquity, I tin can select the text, summon Ubiquity and type "twit this."

For me, when I realized that the developers had continued the word "this" to various means of input selection, I realized that there have been many simple ways to create more human interfaces for a long fourth dimension, only we've ignored them. Let's be honest, at that place'due south nothing technologically groundbreaking about getting a estimator to understand "this" as the text within your selection, but in the electric current country of the web, there's something groundbreaking about it from a user interaction point of view.

Useful Commands

So what exactly can Ubiquity do? Anything really, since creating new commands is pretty like shooting fish in a barrel. But most of us don't want to practice that, so here are a few of the commands that come with Ubiquity, or that yous tin can easily get from the Herd.

Earlier you invoke a command, you lot need to summon Ubiquity. Think the Ubiquity window by pressing Alt/Choice + Space, unless yous've changed the summon shortcut to something else.

Wikipedia: Exercise quick, on-the-spot research with the Wikipedia control. In full it's wikipedia inserttopic, but you can substitute west for wikipedia to get there faster.

Define: Typing define word will return the definition of a word within the Ubiquity window.

Transport This To: Select a chunk of text and, afterward summoning Ubiquity, blazon send this to person. It's almost creepy watching information technology open Gmail and fix a bulletin with the selected text in information technology, correctly addressed to the right person.

Get Lyrics: This one doesn't come with Ubiquity, only you lot tin can grab it from the Herd. If you lot want to know the lyrics to the vocal you're listening to, summon Ubiquity, blazon become-lyrics Welcome to the Jungle and you lot'll be presented with a Google search page with various lyrics for that song. I would similar it meliorate if it took you lot straight to a lyrics page, just this is okay in the meantime.

Maps: When I heard Ubiquity did maps, I idea if you gave it a street number and proper name, suburb and state, it would throw the map upwardly for you. It does do that, but it tin can exercise a lot more than. I thought I'd run across if it could find the location of my very first job when I was in high school, with simply minimal information. Equally you can see, information technology did:

If you lot click the map thumbnail, it enlarges and provides you with a link: "insert map in page." If you're on a regular HTML page, yous wouldn't look this to work, only information technology does. More useful, though, is the power to apace drop a map into an email:

To get to this signal, I had to blazon "Helensvale KFC," select it, summon Ubiquity and type map, click the map and click a link. It takes virtually ten seconds to go a map in your email, compared to the five minutes it used to take.

Room for Improvement

Let me briefly preface this section. A pet peeve of mine is when software reviewers slam an app and call it useless when information technology is clearly beta or even alpha software. Information technology irritates me, so I'm certainly non joining in. And then here goes: this software is a 0.1 release and whatsoever problems I've mentioned here are observations that I'one thousand sure volition get fixed somewhen. None of this is deal-breaking because the app is very early in its evolution.

The first outcome I came across during my fourth dimension with the software was that the weather condition implementation isn't the all-time. If I look for Brisbane'due south weather condition past invoking Ubiquity and typing weather brisbane, information technology works fine. Nonetheless, if I ask it for weather aureate coast, the Gold Declension beingness where I really live, I get nothing.

Merely if I become to my OS X dashboard and type nothing just "gilt coast" into Apple's Weather widget, which uses AccuWeather.com, I get results right away. Is this a problem with Ubiquity? The weather site it uses or the API the conditions site supplies? I don't know, but I know that in that location are meliorate conditions services out at that place.

The 2nd result I had with Ubiquity may merely be an issue considering I've been spoiled by Quicksilver, merely nonetheless there'due south room for improvement in the way Ubiquity takes the text you've typed and looks for one of its commands that closely matches.

When you summon Ubiquity and endeavor to invoke a command, the list of options presented doesn't search intelligently. For example, I employ Quicksilver to recall the Start-upwards Disk Preference Pane whenever I want to kicking into Windows on my iMac. Quicksilver will discover that pane and let me invoke the right command whether I blazon whatever of the post-obit:

• Of course, startup (I use it regularly enough that st or sta will work as well)
• artup
• starupd
• diskpane
• starttuuu

You can make spelling mistakes, miss letters, or start from the second letter or even second word of the command, and Quicksilver will even so find it for you.

Equally far as I'm concerned, this intelligent search is exactly why Quicksilver is so useful as an app launcher. To be truly powerful, Ubiquity must implement something like this. I know this is 0.one software, so I don't really wait these features to be present, but I'd say if information technology'southward non in there by the big 1.0, then this extension is going in the wrong management.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line? Download it and try it. See if it's for you. Personally, I swear by apps like Ubiquity and Quicksilver and I think everybody should apply them.

However, not everyone agrees, and then give it a shot and see if information technology's right for y'all – but give it a off-white shot and spend some fourth dimension with information technology before you reject it. If you can't try it because yous're not using Firefox, that'southward fine… unless y'all're still using Internet Explorer. In that example, go and download a decent browser!

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Source: https://www.lifehack.org/articles/featured/a-first-look-at-mozillas-ubiquity.html