Ubiquity In Depth
An experiment into connecting the Web with language.
Ubiquity is an experiment two parts. It’s both an interface and a development platform. Ubiquity 0.1 focuses on the platform aspects, while beginning to explore language-driven methods of controlling the browser.
Read about the release here, or download it.
In this post, we’ll talk first about the interface, and then the platform. For those who are really impatient, and just want to see how the prototype version works, check out all of the pretty screenshots and use-cases in the Ubiquity Tutorial.
The Problem: The Web is Disconnected
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.
This kind of clunky, time-consuming interaction is common on the Web. Mashups help in some cases but they are static, require Web development skills, and are largely site-centric rather than user-centric.
It’s even worse on mobile devices, where limited capability and fidelity makes this onerous or nearly impossible.
Most people do not have an easy way to manage the vast resources of the Web to simplify their task at hand. For the most part they are left trundling between web sites, performing common tasks resulting in frustration and wasted time.
A Solution: Universal Access
Ubiquity’s interface goal is to enable the user to instruct the browser (by typing, speaking, using language) what they want to do.
http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/
