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It’s often hard to remember Ubiquity’s presence and keystroke without a visual reminder—even I often forget that I could use Ubiquity and end up going to a search engine or using the search bar for some quick lookup task. What if the Ubiquity input were in the toolbar and always visible? How would that affect people’s use of Ubiquity? And what could we make that look like and how would it behave? Today we’re kicking off the Ubiquity Persistence Project, a new Ubiquity initiative to explore what a persistent Ubiquity might look like in the Firefox toolbar.

In order to facilitate this discussion, we created the Persistence tool. With the Persistence tool you can quickly try out new design and interaction ideas, mocking things up with some simple jQuery-powered JavaScript and CSS and see your changes live. The Persistence tool is bundled with our latest Ubiquity beta (install link).

The Ubiquity Persistence Project: exploring a persistent Ubiquity in the toolbar from mitcho on Vimeo.

I just put together a screencast introducing the initiative, demoing the Persistence tool, as well as talking about this project’s relation to the ongoing work on Taskfox. We’ll look forward to your comments and designs!

Since the dawn of time people have been asking about command chaining in Ubiquity. If you have a translate command and an email command, it would be great to be able to, for example, translate hello to Spanish and email to Juanito. This is what we call command chaining or piping: in a single complex query, specifying multiple (probably two) actions and using the first’s output as the second’s input.¹

Today I hope to cover some of the technical considerations required in implementing command chaining in Ubiquity, and I will follow up soon with a blog post on the linguistic considerations required as well.

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