Ubiquity is a Firefox prototype add-on that is similar to Launchy but located in the browser. Launchy is a Windows launcher that makes things much easier. Ubiquity takes that concept to the web. The interface is loaded with CTRL SPace. A black transparent block is opened just below the header bars of Firefox waiting for input.

Now the interesting aspect of this is that everything happens in that black area. A basic example would be if you want to write a message about something that you discovered to Twitter. With Ubiquity you press CTRL Space and enter Twitter This is a cool thing that I discovered. Enter sends the mail to Twitter. That’s it. No more leaving a page, no widgets in the background that you need to open.

Lots of commands are available by default. I would say about 50 are available. This reaches from normal web searches, map searches, translations, adding events to the calendar, emailing, calculating or digging. Lots of stuff to explore and it is pretty exciting that users can create their own commands.

This requires some programming skills but I’m confident that we will see many user created commands that can be integrated into the own version of Ubiquity easily.

A wonderful feature is the Google Maps integration. If you got a list of addresses Ubiquity can map all of them on a Google Map and it is possible to add the map to the current page, for example an email or web form.

There is so much possibility. What can I say. Go get it right now, it is a killer app. Thanks again Amos, your tip was wonderful.

Related posts

• Split The Firefox Browser (5)
• Sort Firefox Bookmarks (3)
• Share, bookmark and e-mail links with Shareaholic (2)
• Secure Firefox with Firekeeper (2)
• Open multiple links at once in Firefox (6)

The first question that obviously comes to mind is how Snowl is any different from current RSS News Feed Readers and the honest answer at this point has to be not much. Twitter is offering RSS News Feeds as well which means that any RSS Reader can currently display the same information that Mozilla Snowl can.

The only difference currently lies in the interface which provides two different view modes. The first reminds of desktop email clients like Thunderbird. It is divided into three different panes, on the left the RSS News Feeds, in the upper half the messages of the selected RSS News Feed and at the bottom half the selected message.

The second view mode is called River of Messages which looks pretty much like a newspaper when the messages are expanded. That mode looks pretty fine to receive a quick overview of new items that have been added.

Snowl does have a few of the problems that I experienced with the Live Bookmarks setting in Firefox. Importing RSS News Feeds virtually slows down the system to a halt. That’s extremely frustrating if you import hundreds of feeds from an OPML file. The same happens if you update the feeds, something that you will never experience in external applications or online services like Google Reader.

That alone is reason enough for me to not use Mozilla Snowl on a regular basis. The developers have some interesting plans for Snowl. They want to add true two-way communication capabilities, for example reading and writing Twitter messages.

Related posts

• Page Bookmarks (2)
• Load Websites With Hotkeys In Firefox (10)
• Firefox Drag And Drop Search (0)
• Add Noise To Firefox (4)
• Web Browser: Firefox Save Tabs Add-On (1)