
Mozilla Ubiquity: a ridiculously useful Firefox extension - acangiano
http://vimeo.com/1561578?pg=embed&sec=1561578
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gnoupi
In my humble opinion, this is simply a command line with defined shortcuts. It
may look all great when he uses it, normal, he designed it, with his words,
his sentences. But honestrly, after trying this ubiquity for a while, i have
difficulties finding it "user-friendly".

It's like calling a unix-shell "user-friendly" because with all commands, and
pipes, and possibilities to combine them you can do everything. It's possible,
sure, but who really can, besides like 1-2% of computer users ?

I get the same feeling from this thing. It's supposed to make you feel like
you only ask your computer for something and it comes naturally, but
basically, it's only typing a command to make an action. And the main flaw of
it, is that words that are obvious to one person, are not to another.

And last point, I know, it's still alpha software, but not everyone does
everything with their keyboard. I do, i'm quite a big fan of utilities like
Launchy, for example, but most of people prefer to use a mouse for their
actions, they want a flow of action, they want drag and drop.

Basically, this ubiquity, it's just a unix command line adapted to a browser,
but i can't see that becoming very useful to most people.

~~~
old-gregg
I agree with everything above, except this one: _"they want drag and drop."_

In my experience users _hate_ to drag and drop. And they never drag and drop,
with an exception of very few Apple old-timers, because Apple GUIs
historically have been using drag&drop more heavily, as opposed to Windows
users who are more conditioned to right-click on everything.

Drag&drop never works in user interfaces because 99% objects in everyday
software are not draggable and _users are not conditioned_ to even try.
Buttons plus menu is what people are used to.

P.S. This opinion comes from reading hundreds of support emails and replying
"have you tried dragging it?" over and over and over again.

~~~
ralph
They hate D&D on the systems you've seen them use. I've seen them use it for
many years on an OS called RISC OS, written by Acorn, designers of the ARM
chip. There, users loved it. Everything supported it on the desktop. You had
`filer' windows, and to save an application would just pop up a little window
with a file icon and a text box for the leafname. Enter `foo' and drop it on
the filer window where you wanted it.

But better than that, you could drop it on another application. Consequently,
you could create and edit a pixmap, and drop it into a vector drawing program
where it would become an embedded object. Want to edit it again? Drag it from
there back to the pixmap editing program's icon on the icon bar. Neither of
these touched the disc; it was in memory transfers. And the program code
didn't need to know the difference between saving to another app., or saving
to disc through a filer window.

Other aspects of the desktop were also novel and worked well. It had a three
button mouse. A proper one. No silly scroll wheel. The right button did what
the left button did, but altered in some way. So you'd pop up a context
sensitive menu with the middle button. Select an item with L and the menu
would disappear. With R the menu would stay there. Great for when you want to
do several menu items in a row, e.g. adjusting an object's attributes.

Scrollbars worked better. Firstly, the mouse cursor on the screen only moved
in one dimension once a drag with L was started. None of this cancel the drag
if you wander off orthogonally a bit. But if there were two scrollbars,
dragging with R would control both; an instant `pan' widget.

Hold the `up' arrow with L and it would scroll up. Switch to R and it would
scroll down. No need to move to the other end of the scroll bar. Same with
`paging' by clicking either side of the thumb.

Drag a window by it's title bar with L and it'll come to the front of the
stack at the same time. Use R and its depth is unaltered.

Double-click a folder icon in a filer window with L and a new window opens
with its contents. Use R, the current window switches to show that directory.
Close a filer window with R and it becomes the parent folder.

Note, you didn't need to know all these uses of R to use the system. You could
manage with L. But the paper User Guide it was shipped with explained it and
you soon got used to the productivity gains.

This was back in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, you can find remnants of it in
the ROX (RISC OS on X) Desktop. <http://roscidus.com/desktop/>

Acorn did some smart stuff. Today, the main vestige is the ARM chip and its
instruction set, designed by Sophie Wilson.

------
iamwil
I've been using it for a couple months, and I've had some problems with it, as
it's still alpha software.

As ubiquity gets updates, the ubi scripts get out of step. The command to
email a page to someone is pretty handy--if it worked most of the time.

Also, the algorithm to do real-time narrowing down of commands that you might
mean gets slower and slower (seemingly exponentially) the more you type. After
a while, I find it gets bogged down and unusable.

The only use I've had for it was to make it easier to twitter something, only
because I don't have twitter clients installed.

That said, it's still early. I think the concept is good. And even better when
you can have context specific commands for each web app that you visit. That
way you don't need to download each ubi script as you want them. They
dynamically load and unload with the web application.

------
azharcs
There is something very similar to Ubiquity by a startup called Wundrbar. Here
is a comparison of Ubiquity and Wundrbar.

[http://blog.wundrbar.com/2008/08/wundrbar-vs-ubiquity-our-
th...](http://blog.wundrbar.com/2008/08/wundrbar-vs-ubiquity-our-
thoughts.html)

------
0xdefec8
Very cool. I love how some software is approaching the point of almost
transcending the UI. If you combined something like Ubiquity with voice
recognition I think you'd basically have a real version of 60s campy sci-fi
tech: "computer, cross reference joker's last known whereabouts with..."

~~~
ambition
There's a project at the University of Toronto working on voice recognition
for Ubiquity.

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gojomo
If you like Ubiquity, you should also look at Inky, "a sloppy command-line
interface for the web":

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1llZnsye0M>

[http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16861/1/uist08-inky-
preprint....](http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/16861/1/uist08-inky-preprint.pdf)

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katamole
Why not link to a more useful page?

<http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/>

~~~
andreyf
Because I already submitted it, just over 100 days ago:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=310045>

Glad people finally saw it - the submitter was smart to point out it's a FF
extension in the title.

~~~
katamole
I see. Is it not possible to submit the same URL twice? (serious question,
I've never tried).

~~~
inglorian
It's not. HN will automatically link you to the previous submission.

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brandonkm
Projects like this make me love Mozilla even more. This type of extension is
beyond useful and is outright intuitive. Can't wait to try this out!

~~~
juanpablo
So then don't wait: <https://ubiquity.mozilla.com/xpi/ubiquity-latest.xpi>

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jballanc
I tried Ubiquity, but I found the requirement that you be in Firefox to use it
a little to restrictive to make it truly useful. I still only spend ~30% of
the time on a computer inside a browser.

On the other hand, Google's Quick Search Box (<http://code.google.com/p/qsb-
mac/>) is looking a lot like Ubiquity without the browser!

~~~
misuba
Quick Search's launching capacity is getting there, but the real place to be
if you want maximum flexibility is the open-source version of Enso (the
original linguistic-CLI project from the people behind Ubiquity). It's all in
Python, so it's very accessible.

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sam_in_nyc
I'm so glad I switched from commenting to this.

In about a month, Ubiquity will be the Linux, and I'll be the Windows.

------
jgfoot
But watch out for the many security problems associated with Ubiquity's system
for installing and updating plugins.

<http://news.cnet.com/8301-13739_3-10053044-46.html>

~~~
misuba
The bulk of the work on Ubiquity 0.2 has been to address these sorts of
problems.

