The all-powerful Ubiquity tool for Firefox
Posted by colinsimpson on August 29, 2008
I’ve been checking out a new plug-in for Firefox this morning which is seriously impressing me. It’s called Ubiquity and you can find it here. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial
In essence, it allows you to open a small window in your browser window like this by pressing ctrl+space and type in a few words to perform a whole range of functions.
In this instance I typed flickr ubiquity mozilla – to search flickr for images tagged ubiquity and/or mozilla
So far I’ve been able to:
- get instant translations of selected text
- search websites like Flickr, wikipedia, youtube, googlemaps and more
- send emails
- perform calculations
- edit the text on webpages
- convert a webpage to a pdf file
- check email addresses in my contact list by typing a persons name
- highlight text on a page
- add maps to email (though not yet to this blog post)
- send a message to my twitter account
- get a word-count of text selected on a page (148 words up to this point)
- check the weather
- zoom in and out of the page
- add events/meetings to Google Calendar (typing add dinner 6pm tomorrow)
All by just pressing ctrl-space and entering a few logical words
I already feel like my computer use has changed forever.
I will say this, it’s not yet a perfect system – it’s only in alpha (a step or so before beta) and a few of the things that I’ve tried haven’t quite worked as they should. However a quick search of the message boards told me that this problem had been identified a couple of days ago and an update was posted which fixed the problem. Got to love community built software.
This video showcases some of it – it’s about 6 minutes.
