Ubiquity

[andrewducker]

Julie's taking a post-breakfast nap, and I'm catching up with LJ. I just read robhu's latest update on Ubiquity, which pretty much blew me away. It takes the ideas of GreaseMonkey and Firefox's Quick Searches, and expands them massively, allowing for all sorts of functionality at the press of a couple of buttons.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

In sosme ways, the best thing about this is that if it catches on it will encourage developers to produce open APIs to their sites, so that they can be used from it (and other apps). Very impressive.

Comments

[henriksdal.livejournal.com]

The phrase "and I've twittered" at about 4:45 made me want to stab myself repeatedly. But other than that, amazing stuff!

[meico.livejournal.com]

Looks quite cool. It will all come down to the UI and API to see if it really works though. I've though about similar things myself and (without having looked further than that vid) I wonder if this will really work...

I'd really just like to right click on some selected text and have my various commands come up, sometimes typing sucks (like for example, when using a PDA).

Also, I wonder about how powerful the text parsing capabilities of the commands are... You really need some good parsing to make sense of most selections.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely - you can do most of that stuff already - it's just not userfriendly, or easily distributable. If they can build a GreaseMonkey equivalent (where you get snippets from wherever you like) and make it dead simple to use they'll have a winner.