Ubiquity – The Best of The Web
By kidko on October 3rd, 2008
Ubiquity, in a phrase, is the cloud at its finest. Just hit CTRL+Enter, and up pops a friendly (but bland) little box asking for your input. All you’ve got to do is, once you’ve gotten something selected, type in mail this to Craig. GMail will open up, the selected text will be in the body, and Craig will already be in the To: field. Simple as that. But somehow, it manages to be so much more.
Ubiquity is a Mozilla Labs project, a sort of experiment in both cloud computing and natural language input. When writing a command (easy to do, since it’s in JavaScript), you actually specify what kind of word(s) should be given, whether it be a verb, noun, etc. Next important point Ubiquity brings to the table: open APIs and simple input schemes. That’s what it relies on, actually. So far, I personally have installed a command set for Twitter, Facebook, torrent searching, Rotten Tomatoes, a format converter, calculator… not to mention the built-in commands (search of all kinds, email tools, mapping features, and a lot more). The best of which, I have to say, is the edit-page and its related builtins.
edit-page is both amusing and useful. You can actually edit a page as it is, adding or removing pieces, text, images, and whatever else you want. You can change the font properties, copy over elements from another page, and best of all, you can save your annotations. Every time you reload the page, yes, they stay. You can’t add or remove individual annotations, unfortunately, but the remove-annotations command will kill them all at the same time.
You can check out the blog post the devs wrote, or, as another source of information, here’s the official Moz Labs video that got me started on all of this:
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Posted in browsers, programming, tech, web | 2 Comments
[...] Ubiquity – The Best of The Web – Ubiquity, in a phrase, is the cloud at its finest. Just hit CTRL+Enter, and up pops a friendly (but bland) little box asking for your input. All you’ve got to do is, once you’ve gotten something selected, type in mail this to Craig . … [...]
Dude… I’d never seen this before. That’s actually really awesome. DO WANT!