August 27, 2008
Mozilla Labs Announces Ubiquity

Now this has got to be the coolest thing I've seen in ages! Mozilla Labs Announced Ubiquity, which is sadly a bit hard to describe, but once used I'm sure it'll be hard to go back. Mac users can think of it as quicksilver for the web, linux users think gnome-do for the web on steroids.

Basically it allows you to hit a hotkey combination and then type natural(ish) language into the window that pops up. So if you're writing an email in gmail and want to include a map to an address, you'd hit alt-space (or whatever key combo you set up) and type 'map 1234 main street, vancouver, bc' and hit enter. The resulting map will be put into your email. If you're not in an email it'll go to that url.

Ubiquity isn't limited to maps of course, searching, calendar (google calendar currently), bugzilla, calculator, tabs, translation, highlighting..... lots of really cool stuff. It also operates either "alone" or on text / images you've highlighted on a webpage. Very cool stuff, I've had it for about 5 minutes now (it's a firefox plugin) and I can see this changing my browsing very very easily.





Posted by Arcterex at August 27, 2008 09:42 AM