PawEng

I found a story on CyberNet News about an add-on for Firefox that really got my attention. The add-on is Ubiquity, and it gives you an instant command line interface to the web. I have earlier shared my love for command lines so I was very excited about Ubiquity. After installing it, I was not disappointed. Even though Ubiquity is only in version 0.1, it still rocks.

Once you install Ubiquity, you activate the new command line by pressing CTRL + Space (Option + Space on Mac). The command line pops up over your current web page. You can use the built-in commands to search the web, translate text, look up the weather, perform a calculation, send an email, find an address on a map, etc. The results are shown in the pop-up without you having to leave your current page.

A really cool feature is that you can select text, and Ubiquity will transform the text on your web page by performing the calculation or translating the text — it all happens in-place. When you look up a location on the map, you can ask Ubiquity to insert a link to the map. This is very handy when composing emails using a web-based service.

According to the Ubiquity website, the overall goals of Ubiquity are to explore how best to:

• Empower users to control the web browser with language-based instructions. (With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do.)
• Enable on-demand, user-generated mashups with existing open Web APIs. (In other words, allowing everyone–not just Web developers–to remix the Web so it fits their needs, no matter what page they are on, or what they are doing.)
• Use Trust networks and social constructs to balance security with ease of extensibility.
• Extend the browser functionality easily.

Those are pretty loft goals, but after trying out Ubiquity, I think they are on to something.

Read more about Ubiquity at Mozilla Labs.

Tags: Firefox, Linux, Mac, Windows