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A very nice experiment in user interface design: Mozilla’s Ubiquity. Installed it, and like it very much so farThe calculation feature is great, the email commands are very helpful and translation is really a blessing here in Mexico, even though dict.leo.org’s Spanish dictionary is also great.

Minor flaws remain, like umlaut support, but this is also just a first beta. It uses Growl on Mac, yet I’m still experiencing some problems regarding display, e.g. the fonts look ugly and I’m lacking the cool sun graphics that we can see here for example. Will have to work on this later.

Including maps into Gmail alone might be a killer and this whole thing takes the mash-up term to a real new level. Check the below video for some cool examples.

What is Mozilla Ubiquity?
Ubiquity is a Firefox expansion which might prove to be a big step forward in user interaction in the Internet. Basically, it is a step backwards in time, introducing a command line which accepts written commands. Such could include:

• translate azucar to Danish
  (would recognize the Spanish word “azucar” as “sugar” and would translate it into Danish)
• twitter status
  (would set the Twitter status to, well, “status”)
• calculate expression
  (doesn’t know e or p yet, though)
• email message to contact
  (currently only working with Gmail)

A good overview is also delivered by Mozilla themselves:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

How to improve Mozilla Ubiquity?

Just a bunch of first thoughts: Hope there is a currency and measurement converter soon. Should also integrate with OmniFocus, though the email command might be a workaround. Voice recognition would be awesome – especially if combined with a Star Trek LCARS skin. Allow call number for Skype Out. check-calender is cool, what about check-mail? That Ubiquity recognizes words like “it” and “that” and automatically refers to previous entries is great, yet it has also left me with some problems already.

Also check Mashable, tech.blorge.com or the recently redesigned TechCrunch. for further reading. Aza Raskin’s blogpost announcing Ubiquity is also a great collection of further links on the topic.