Tropophilia

When I first started using a Mac, I read several different blog posts that recommended a program called Quicksilver.  Quicksilver, according to its developer, is a “unified, extensible interface for working with applications, contacts, music, and other data.”  Put much more simply, it is designed to be a more natural way to interact with you computer.

The basic premise of Quicksilver is that, after “invoking” it with a quick keystroke, you more or less type what you want to happen, and it happens.  From sending an image to a friend by email to burning a playlist onto a CD, tasks that would take a few minutes of searching and a multitude of clicks and drags can be accomplished in a few keystrokes.

I never got hooked on Quicksilver, but today Mozilla has released a test version of a similar tool for its popular Firefox browser — ambitiously called Ubiquity — that I believe I will come to embrace and rely on every day.  If you’ve ever been frustrated by tasks that you think should be remarkably easy to execute — defining a word, checking the weather, mapping an address and copying that map into an email, etc. — then Ubiquity has that, and more, for you.  By invoking the tool and typing “define”, “wikipedia”, “weather”, “google”, “imdb” and other commands followed by a word, the Web’s most popular services are at your fingertips.

While you can hit enter to go straight to the service in question, the results will also load as you type.  All of this takes place in a opaque window in the top left of your browser.  Here’s me searching for one of my recent favorite words:

And here’s me researching my favorite place in the world on Wikipedia

What if I told you Ubiquity could translate text on a webpage?  No, you don’t have to copy the text, open a new tab, go to Google Translate, paste the text, select the languages, and click OK.  That’s so July 2008.  Instead, you highlight the text on the web page, hit a keystroke to invoke Ubiquity, type “translate this into (language)”, and click enter.  The text you selected, on the page itself, is translated.

Here’s the opening paragraph of an NYT article about how Russia is ridiculous:

And here it is after Ubiquity has completed an instant, in-line translation of that paragraph into the most beautiful language in the world:

As Steve Jobs would say: “Boom.”

What if you’re on Craigslist, and you’re browsing through a bunch of listings, and you want to highlight the ones you like?  Or delete the ones you don’t like?  Or even move some text around?  Invoke Ubiquity, type “edit”, hit enter.  The page is yours to annotate at will.  Delete and move text.  Highlight text you want to format, invoke, and type “bold”, “italic”, or “highlight.”  Don’t worry, you’re not messing anything up.  Just invoke Ubiquity and type “remove” to restore everything.

Turn an address into a map?  Highlight, invoke, “map”, click, insert.  Where your address was — whether in an email or on a webpage — now there’s a map image.  Email that opening NYT article paragraph to a friend?  Highlight, invoke, “email this to Taylor” (it syncs with your Google contacts so it knows who Taylor is), enter.

The possibilities continue.  From updating your calendar to updating Twitter, Ubiquity lets you more easily and more naturally embrace the richness that the modern Web offers.  The real problem — the same problem I had with Quicksilver, and the same problem I have with the Google app on the iPhone — is remembering that it exists.  Once we learn how to do something, it’s hard to change our ways, even if easier and cooler ways exist.  The more relevant the Ubiquity developers can make this app to our daily digital dilly-dallying (count it!), the quicker and more widely it will be adopted.

Mozilla Ubiquity image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user isriya.  Screenshots by the author.