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Uqibuity for Firefox - What's your take?
Written By hthth on Sep. 11, 2008.
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From the Clip Uqibuity for Firefox - smooth to the touch! posted by hthth:
If you’re a Firefox user and live on the web like I do, neck deep in trying out new features and beta services, then you should give Mozilla Lab’s Ubiquity a try. It’s an experimental plugin for FF that reminds me a lot of the desktop application Quicksilver.
It does a lot of things; instant dictionary definitions, translations, conversions to tinyurls, etc. A great productivity tool!
I've been using Ubiquity since it launched the beta, and I'm finding it pretty handy. Apple's neat cmd+atl+d for instant dictionary lookups doesn't work in Firefox, so this replaces it with a simple select world then alt-spacebar. The translation part is neat, I'll probably use it a few times a month.
But I haven't read up on how Ubiquity can be extended. I could Google it ... but then we wouldn't have this discussion. Can you tell me about the extensions, and what's your take on the Ubiquity plugin?
shadowsun7
Written Sep. 12, 2008 / Report /
I've tried it out and I didn't really like the interface. Why can't they use contextual menus, instead of forcing people to type? I thought command line prompts were so 1997 (ehheh, and I wasn't even using computers then).
But ... nifty idea the way they integrate so many services onto one platform. Will be waiting to see what this morphs into.
Kamigoroshi
Written Sep. 13, 2008 / Report /
I've yet to tweak Ubiquity to its fullest, but I already use what it has now and it's become one of my favourite Firefox add-ons (next to another one of Mozilla Lab's plugins Weave).
The hardest thing about it is to break my old surfing habits of say, using the search bar to look for what you want. But after that, all I have to do is use Ctrl-Space and I can search on Google, Wiki and IMDB. I can do instant translations, define words, do quick calculations.
While there are other command line programs out there, the fact that Firefox is always the first thing open makes this easy for me.
I'm going to try and see if I can edit the command list to do other things as well. It's flexible enough, but I still don't have anything I can think of that I can use with this. It seems to do everything I need.
@Shadowsun: Command line interfaces have never really died out. It's just that the general public has been spoiled with icons and the excessive use of mouse clicking. I find it very easy to call on interface with hotkeys and just type out what you want. In fact, it's not just Firefox that I now run with CLI, but my Windows desktop as well, so no desktop icons whatsoever.
Ozone42
Written Sep. 15, 2008 / Report /
It's fantastic, full of potential, and I'm really excited about it. The problem is I don't use firefox. Maybe I'll give it a go when my new iMac gets here, but I am so spoiled by the speed/snappyness of Safari that I feel like I'm moving back a generation any time I fire up the fox.
Though there's no reason ubiquity needs to live inside of a browser. Quicksilver is similar in concept and implementation, and it's a desktop app. The concept of very simple user interaction between a multitude of disparate services... that's gold. I want more of that.