Ubiquity for Firefox: OH MY GOD THIS IS AWESOME!!!!!!!!!11111eleven

If you only have 30 seconds to read my explosion of words, here’s the synopsis: Get Ubiquity. Now. It’s still in Alpha and therefore has some rough edges, but despite that, it is the best thing to ever happen to Firefox. And if you don’t have Firefox, why the hell have you not gotten Firefox yet?

Now for the long version. Ubiquity, according to Wikipedia, “allows web users to create mashups of other web services without requiring much technical background.” Thank you, Wikipedia, for this accurate description which completely and entirely misses the point. They also state, “Ubiquity is a collection of easy and quick natural-language-derived commands that allow users to get information and relate the same to current and other webpages.” That’s more like it. Yeah, I should really edit the article to clarify those two sentences. Brb.

"Goo"gling with Ubiquity - OMG AWESOME!

Okay, there we go. Now that Wikipedia agrees with me, it must be true, so Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that lets you type natural-sounding commands at your browser to make it do things that would normally require 3722438 clicks. And it is the best thing like ever.

Instead of going to Google to do a search for, say, “pandas using iphones”, and then clicking the search button, then clicking the result, you use Alt-Space (Control-Space on Windows/Linux) to open Ubiquity, and type “google pandas using iphones”. And it will load the results. Right there. No new page. Then you can click on one of the results and it loads!!! (Okay, so that’s only two clicks turned into one, but it’s definitely faster, especially since just typing “goo” is enough for Ubiquity to fill in the “gle”).

Wikipedia in Ubiquity - WHEEEEE!

And speaking of Wikipedia, you can search that with Ubiquity. At the moment all you get are small previews of the articles, but that’s probably enough to curb incidents of wiki-time. Again, simply typing “wiki” is sufficient, and a quick press of the Down arrow key will switch to the “link-to-wikipedia” command, which will paste a link to whatever Wikipedia article you type into whatever you’re typing.

Know what you want, but not what the command is? Ubiquity has tags.

The great thing is that commands seem to have tags, so you can type “image” to bring the “flickr” command onto the list. By default, it’s below “google-image” because that actually has “image” in its name, but it gives you the feeling that this thing is very, very smart.

But the amount of things you can do beyond that are absolutely ridiculously awesome. Here’s one of the developers, Aza Raskin, showing us some of the more interesting things Ubiquity can help you do in a voice that reminds me of Quentin Tarantino’s:

That ability to add a customized map to Gmail without leaving the page is really nifty. It also proves that this thing could, theoretically, do anything. It’s like Quicksilver for the web. And the best part is how you can add new commands, which is probably the best idea for extending software since…well, since ever.

IM IN UR UBIKWITEE DOWNLOADIN UR COMMANDZ

Commands for Ubiquity are pretty easy to make, so naturally lots of people have jumped on it. But you don’t have to download anything to use their commands. Instead, they publish a Ubiquity feed, and you subscribe to that. Then Ubiquity will grab that new command, and (if you checked the auto-update box) automatically get updates to it entirely transparently. Okay, so it’s pretty much the same thing as “automatically update my plugins” but it feels more natural and automatic for some reason.

But those Alpha-y rough edges I was talking about before? Jono DiCarlo, also on the Ubiquity dev team, mentions that Ubiquity commands are very inconsistent:

Currently, using Ubiquity is like programming in PHP — where some standard library functions are_like_this() and other functions areLikeThis(). I have to look up the names of functions almost every time I use them in PHP, because there’s no consistency.

It’s not going to be as simple as adding a standard, because Ubiquity commands can’t contain spaces, only hyphens. This means you can’t say “email Dave with gmail”, which would be a very, very natural way of doing things (hint, hint, Jono, though that’s probably the solution you’re going to announce in your upcoming post). But considering the developers have come this far with the amount of epic win in Ubiquity, I’m sure they’ll come through.

By the way, the company that the Ubiquity developers also have (they’re doing Ubiquity for Mozilla Labs, so it’s not under their company name) has something called Enso, which appears to be a Ubiquity-esque thing for your entire computer. I’m not positive, since it’s Windows-only at the moment, and I’m not interested in booting into XP if I’m not going to use it much.

But long story short, Ubiquity is absolutely vital for your enjoyment of life. Get it.

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