You may have thought Mozilla could not open up beyond its current state, but you may be wrong: Aza Raskin, Mozilla Labs’ UX Lead and Sebastiaan de With, a freelance icon designer, have completely opened up the process of designing a new logo for Mozilla Ubiquity. The second round of conceptual exploration has just started, and the popular vote is very welcome on the blog or in the comments. What’s your favorite concept, and why?
Mozilla Ubiquity can only explained by a video. Here we go:
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
I must say that this is one of those projects that falls under the umbrella of a true “aha erlebnis”. If Mozilla can pull this one off, this will be a massive, massive selling point for Firefox. Extend this to native applications as well, and I’m sold, where can I place my orders, I’m going to kiss the people who made this.
As for the logo contest, I’m not seeing any clear winners, but this is a project that doesn’t deserve to have the attention focused on something as insignificant as the logo.
That video impressed me oh so much. I am newly sold on microformats and the semantic web in general. I also note with some amusement that basically the whole high tech world seems to have settled on mainly using Google products.
I think a google only approach would be the last thing mozilla (or any browser maker) would want after Chrome.
I’ve been using Ubiquity since the first prototype and it has pretty much been the only reason I think I’ll continue to use Firefox (along with Linux support) as my preferred browser over Chrome. 3.1 is shaping up to be an excellent release and I hope Ubiquity becomes part of the default eventually.
Having said that, I would also love to see Ubiquity as a stand-alone app too, something that can be invoked like Launchy or Katapult. That would be an incredibly powerful tool.
Still not sold on the usefulness of it. Using it might save me a couple seconds here and there.
But, the security & privacy implications are probably interesting. How much information does ubiquity have access to? How easy is it to create a custom command that launches a CSRF attack, or similar?
It seems like a great idea, but I wonder how tightly tied into specific services it would be? For example, when looking up maps, I’m assuming it’s using Google Maps? I know many people prefer Mapquest.
If you wanted information on a movie, either dvd or theatre, where would it pull the information from? The reason I ask, is that many people use a *lot* of different services for different things. For example, me personally, I like Google’s email and search, Yahoo’s movies, Mapquest, IMDB, MSN’s Stock, etc. Would you be able to select what service it uses, or will it mostly be tied in with one or two providers?
In the video you can see that you can easily add new scripts. It shouldn’t be a problem – if it gets popular- to find a script for your favourite services so it won’t be tied to any service-provider.
I hope it will improve fast cause I like the add-on, but it slows down firefox on start-up. But it’s still a 0.1 so I shouldn’t complain.
This isn’t something that i’d want to use.
trying to talk to my computer is just annoying. seeing what I am doing is much better then just telling the computer what to do. What i mean by this isn’t what the video is showing.
For example, when the video shows adding event to calender. I much prefer to look at mine before adding any slots just to be sure there aren’t going to be times where things have a possiblity for overrun or where I may need a timeout (or not) depending on the event, such as a known problem client. And by look at it, I want to see at least a day view with hour by hour.
Also, I don’t think everyone explains things in the same way, and I know this is what most of its about but there are still keywords, such as ‘map-this’ thats not english, its a command word.
There are people who’ll give much more detail, such as ‘show me a map of all the locations I’ve selected’ where other people will just say ‘where are these?’
The first is pretty limiting to what the program needs to find and show, but the later can be from what sites they’re from, the location of the links on a map .etc
they aim to use scripts, while this is great if they’re kept upto date with the sites they’re designed to work with, when sites change and scripts need updating or users have to find new scripts to sites/services, then it just seems like more effort then is needed.
Good luck to them though, certainly seems like a start on AI computing.
Ah, the days of the CLI are returning! Just type your commands and the computer does what you are saying, because of scripts. This must really turn on any Unix enthusiast
.
Can you tell me when they actually did disappear?
It’s a very comfortable concept of doing things. Instead of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get), it’s much easier just to YAFIYGI (you asked for it, you got it).
But yeah, script driven stuff can be handy to minimize interaction for doing boring stuff and have more time to concentrate on more important things. To take the calendar example, the less time you spend on managing your appointments, the more time you’ve got for them (and between them).
Hehe, my thoughts exactly! These guys are patting their backs so hard, they probably didn’t even notice they were reinventing the wheel.
I was going to point out how they were using the selection as a commands argument, but that isn’t so new either (open `favorite-text-editor^A', select text, go to “Edit” menu and hit “Copy”.)
Not even their “It’s scriptable; by you!” concept is anything new – greasemonkey anyone?
So what is really new? I’ll tell you: The Package and The Presentation! And as we all know, that’s what it’s all about.
;-P
Talk about anticlimactic. It’s a convenience: nothing you haven’t been able to do for years via task-switching and an intelligent use of the web.
That said, it will probably be “ubiquitous” within a couple of years.