I've been checking out a new plug-in for Firefox this morning which is seriously blowing my mind. It's called Ubiquity and you can find it here. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial
In essence, it allows you to open a small window in your browser window like this and type in a few words to perform a whole range of functions.
So far I've been able to:
- get instant translations of selected text
- search websites like Flickr, wikipedia, youtube, googlemaps and more
- send emails
- perform calculations
- edit the text on webpages
- convert a webpage to a pdf file
- check email addresses in my contact list by typing a persons name
- highlight text on a page
- add maps to email (though not yet to this blog post)
- send a message to my twitter account
- get a word-count of text selected on a page (148 words up to this point)
- check the weather
- zoom in and out of the page
I already feel like my computer use has changed forever.
I will say this, it's not yet a perfect system - it's only in alpha (a step or so before beta) and a few of the things that I've tried haven't quite worked as they should. A meeting I tried to add to google calender didn't appear and some of the emails I sent had a little bit of html code in them - but seriously, everything else has worked astoundingly well.
This video showcases some of it - it's about 6 minutes.
