Mozilla Ubiquity - the Web-integrated YOU

[Mrkvonic]

Hi,

I remember iceni60 introduced this here some time ago. Now, here's a review, hands-on.

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension. And it's awesome. It's fast, smart and highly useful. It will do a magic load of mundane web tasks for you, from sending emails, googling and wiki-ing stuff, translating, calculating, checking out maps and weather, and more.

And this is only the beginning.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/ubiquity.html

Comments and feedback are welcome.

Cheers,
Mrk

[sukarof]

I dont understand it yet coz it seems you can do many things (even the author doesnt seem to know all you can do with it :) ).
I find it cool to write "wikipedia elvis" or whatever search term after the site, "IMDB raiders of the lost arc" (or whatever movie) and even if I spelled arc wrong it took me to the database.
"Weather sodertalje" gives me weather in my home town. all much faster than going trough bookmarks. I am really a mouse guy, I want to everything with the mouse but this seems to brake that habit :)
Looks like a keeper. :thumb:

[yeow]

Hi Mrkvonic, thanks for the introduction & writeup. Trying Ubiquity out now, and having fun too seeing what it can do. Amazing!

[Meriadoc]

How did I ever miss this?..Thankyou Mrk:thumb:

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,
You're welcome. This is going to be a killer-app.
And if you know javascript, then you can make your own little tricks, kind of google apps meets greasemonkey meets ruby on rails.
Mrk

[SpikeyB]

Looks really great. It's like a supercharged Deskbar from linux. Now if it could work from the desktop too that would be amazing.

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,
Well, in Linux, you can pin apps to desktop. gOS allowsyou to add terminal into the desktop. So I guess this will be possible too. Check out my gOS article to see the embedded terminal example...
Mrk

[SpikeyB]

Cheers Mrkvonic.

I was thinking it would be nice for Ubiquity to run from the desktop. It's a bit like a macro recorder with some prewritten and semi-intelligent macros.

If it ran from the desktop then it might be able detect your default mail client and run that instead of gmail. You could say play xxxx.mp3 and it would check a specified folder and open it in mplayer or something. You could say transfer photos and it would open blue tooth, connect to your camera and download your photos or print this to print the current document.

It sounds really exciting and I think it would be so much better running from the desktop than in a web browser, which is only part of your arsenal.

[Mrkvonic]

Hello,

The thing with gmail and not mail client is: the browser is sandboxed so it has no access to local filesystem. That's the beauty of secure browsers, like FF or Opera. IE does interact with local files via FSO and look where it got us.

It would be nice, but I don't think it would be secure ... better this way, web stuff only.

Mrk

[yeow]

Anyone finds it works ok when Firefox is started, but after browsing for some time Ubiquity stops working? The command line window still comes up, but highlighted word/phrase is not captured & nothing happens with entered commands.

Then everything works again when Firefox is restarted.

[Mrkvonic]

Did not notice this behavior...
On Windows?
Mrk

[yeow]

Windows XP. Thought it was Firefox 3.1 beta, but it's happening now with 3.0.4 too.

[yeow]

http://groups.google.com/group/ubiquity-firefox/browse_thread/thread/75955c348c1dcd54

Could be the same problem there. I thought maybe it's one of my add-ons, but looking at the posts there - I only have Adblock Plus in common with his.

[yeow]

Thankfully Ubiquity is working nicely on my Linux distro, that's running Firefox 3.0.3 :thumb:. It's so handy to highlight word/phrase -> translate, wiki & google etc. Gotta love it can't do without it :-*:D.

Hope to have it back on my WinXP firefox!

[SpikeyB]

Hey, I managed to find a programme like Ubiquity that runs from the desktop: http://www.launchy.net/