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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!

(This is primarily a blog post to test out Sandro’s plugin for embedding Ubiquity commands in WordPress. If you don’t see the “subscribe to command” come up, make sure you’re looking at the single page view.)

A while back I created a count command for Ubiquity to count HTML elements on a page, so I’ll share it here. The idea is super simple: select some text on your page and execute count p to get the number of paragraphs, or count a to get the number of links, or count tr to get the number of table rows. This is super useful when reading articles with charts or lists online and you want to know how many there are without doing something like copy-pasting into Excel.

The count command is built using jQuery so it can even understand targets like p.class or a[href=...]. Give it a try! ^^

A few weeks ago I made some visual mockups of how Ubiquity could look and act in Japanese. Part of this proposal was what I called “particle identification”: that is, immediate in-line identification of delimiters of arguments, which can be overridden by the user:

The inspiration for this idea came from Aza’s blog post “Solving the ‘it’ problem” which advocates for this type of quick feedback to the user in cases of ambiguity. Such a method would help both the user better understand what is being interpreted by the system, as well as offer an opportunity for the user to correct improper parses. I just tried mocking up such an input box using jQuery.

➔ Try the User-Aided Disambiguation Demo

If you have any bugfixes to submit or want to play around with your own copy, the demo code is up on BitBucket. ^^ Let me know what you think!