Ubiquity

In this week’s podcast we mention Mozilla Labs Ubiquity project and we basically say we aren’t sure what to make of it…that has a lot to do with the fact that I didn’t get a chance to look at it before we recorded. If I had, I would have been raving about it! Ubiquity isn’t actually a location technology, the demo in the intro just takes advantage of the web mapping APIs as examples.

In fact Ubiquity is just a way to access APIs directly using typed commands. If you are familiar with Quicksilver on the Mac (which I can’t live without even though I don’t use it to its full extent) then you have a pretty good idea of how to use Ubiquity. In the simplest description, you can call up the Ubiquity interface with a hot key, then type in what you want to do (formatted in a way that can recognized by Ubiquity of course). The truth is that there is no way to truly describe it sufficiently, you have to try it to truly understand it. To get a better sense of what is possible with Ubiquity you really need to at least watch the video. This is a really exciting project which moves us ever closer to a human language interface to computers.