Ubiquity: Three types of awesome
A couple of days ago, Mozilla labs released Ubiquity 0.1, which is a browser-based natural language command helper. Sounds geeky – and it is, but oh-so hot. Basically it’s a Firefox plugin that allows you to perform actions and pull information from services without leaving the screen you are in. If a picture tells a thousand words, a video tells a thousand pictures (That’s 1000000 words according to the ubiquity calc command).
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Being a command line junkie, this is FREAKING AWESOME. Not having to open up a new tab just to find a definition, or to post to twitter stops you from having to make a context switch and break your current thought process. What is even more awesome is that if you know JavaScript, you can really quickly write your own verbs. For example, I just wrote a quick verb called goto that opens a URL in a new tab [Get it here]. Think of the precious seconds I save by not having to move the mouse. It also allows you to annotate websites, and highlight text as well as colour code source that you might find, plus so much more. If you are a geek and you are on the web. Go and check it out.