Ubiquity - Quicksilver style plugin for Firefox

Rick Stirling

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

It's very nice. At it's most basic, it's a popup search with auto complete/auto suggestion.

It can also issue internet based commands on selected text, and provide quick popup definitions of highlighted text. For example, I'm reading an article about Hellboy, I select the word Hellboy and press Alt+Space (CTRL+Space on a PC), and this is what I see on my screen:



Links to searches, and excerpts from 3 Hellboy related sites.

Why not just go to Google and type Hellboy? Cos this is FAST.



I'ts linked to googlemail at the moment, so if you want to email the current webpage to someone, invoke it (ALT/CTRL+Space) then start typing "Email to" and then start typing the persons name or email address.



Oh, highlighting an address and typing "Map" will give you the location on Googlemaps.

Rick Stirling

Bumping this with video.

http://vimeo.com/1561578

Eric Chadwick

This looks awesome, thanks Rick.

Michael Knubben

Yeah, lifehacker covered this a while back. It's marvelous, but I didn't try it then because I thought it was still in alpha. I might give it a go now, though, just because it does seem like the sort of thing you can't live without after you've gotten used to it.

pior

Doesn't it look like a time-saving extension actually making one spend *more* time on a computer?

Rob Galanakis

Had no idea what it did without that video, this is really neat. Not ready for it yet, though, but will anticipate future versions.

East

It looks cool, and it has a lot of potential. I've tried it for a few hours now, and the biggest problem is I can't remember to use it. It's the same thing with all these things that are supposed to enhance the way I do this, or do that. I never remember to use them, and when I do they often end up just detracting me, and making me less productive.

I need these things to be better integrated into the whole "flow" of things, so that I am forced to use them in an intuitive way. As it is now they are always just bootstrapped onto something else.

monster

This is similar to Accelerators in Internet Explorer 8. [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pmw4nJBJ0s[/ame]

But this seems like it can eventually be more robust.