Ubiquity

I’ve long been a fan of Quick­sil­ver, and my favourite fea­ture on the Newton is the Assist button. The former lets me find things on my com­puter, and do stuff with those things at break­neck speed. The latter takes words writ­ten in nat­ural lan­guage, and inter­prets them, work­ing out that when I write, say, ‘lunch with Steve on Tue’, I prob­a­bly want to add an appoint­ment to my cal­en­dar at 1 o’clock next Tues­day, with Steve listed as among the attendees.

Ubiq­uity, a new Fire­fox add-​on, com­bines the high-​speed access to and manip­u­la­tion of infor­ma­tion of Quick­sil­ver with the user-​friendly lan­guage inter­pre­ta­tion of the Assist button, bolt­ing both onto the browser. Ulti­mately, it has the poten­tial to be some­thing close to a com­mand line inter­face for the web.

With the add-​on installed, all you have to do is press the com­mand key com­bi­na­tion - Alt+Space by default on the Mac - and start typing a com­mand. There are lots of simple ones. Type wikipedia¹ fol­lowed by a search term, hit enter, and you’re trans­ported to the rel­e­vant results. Type email Don't forget our lunch on Tuesday! to Steve, hit enter, and you’ll be taken to Gmail, with your mes­sage all ready to send.

Ubiq­uity gets really clever when you want to com­bine its fea­tures. What if Steve hasn’t been to the restau­rant you’re meet­ing at? Before send­ing the mail Ubiq­uity helped you to create, invoke it again, and type map Stravaign. Yep, a Google Map cen­tred on the best Glas­gow pub will appear, along with a link to insert it directly into your mail message.

Like Quick­sil­ver, Ubiq­uity is a wee bit fiddly to explain, and doesn’t sound quite as thrilling as it does when seen in action. So here’s a video walk-​through (skip for­ward forty-​five sec­onds if you want to avoid the hip marketing-​speak intro):

Sure, devel­oper Aza Raskin is show­ing Ubiq­uity in the best pos­si­ble light. In real life, it’s pretty buggy - fair enough, since it’s a pro­to­type. It’s very lim­ited in scope, too - if you don’t use Google’s cal­en­dar and mail appli­ca­tions, the best fea­tures won’t be much use. And it won’t do some of the things you might expect it to, like lift­ing micro­for­mat­ted infor­ma­tion from web pages and dump­ing them into your address book or cal­en­dar. But it has huge poten­tial to turn dis­parate web ser­vices, which, until now, we’ve had to wran­gle together our­selve with unwieldy cut­ting and past­ing, into one great big useful thing.

Also, in the wake of the recent fawn­ing over Aurora - a vision of the coming web in which useful com­bi­na­tions of ser­vices were buried under need­lessly jazzy 3-D inter­faces con­trolled by daft futur­is­tic periph­er­als - and sim­i­lar mock-​ups, it’s good to see a project which offers some of the basic util­i­ties imag­ined by the futur­ol­o­gists on the Aurora team, right now, using a simple, clear inter­face that takes advan­tage of one skill all web users share: the abil­ity to type words in a lan­guage they understand.

More info:

• Intro­duc­ing Ubiq­uity
• Ubiq­uity 0.1 User Tuto­r­ial
• Ubiq­uity In Depth
• Ubiq­uity cracks open per­sonal mashup tin­ker­ing *Writ­ing a Deli­cious com­mand for Ubiq­uity

Thanks to Neil and Matt for point­ing me in Ubiquity’s direc­tion!

1. Or just wi. Ubiq­uity is clever enough to work out what you’re after, or will present a list of pos­si­ble com­mands to choose from. It will also work out that, if you’ve selected some text on a web page, that’s what you want to search for.↩

Posted at 3pm on 28/08/08 by Jack Mottram to the web category.
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Tags: firefox, interface, web