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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!

今夜リリースされる Ubiquity の最新版、0.5 に備えて日本語で Ubiquity のスクリーンキャストを作ってみました。 Ubiquity 0.5 は特に多言語化を重視したリリースで、 Ubiquity 内蔵のコマンドが日本語とデンマーク語で使えるようになっています。是非インストールしてみてください！

追伸： ７月３日現在、 Ubiquity 0.5 のリリースを遅らせる方向になったので、残念ながら今日はリリースされません。是非リリース後インストールしてみてください。

Ubiquity 0.5 日本語紹介ビデオ from mitcho on Vimeo.

As Ubiquity 0.5 will be released soon (Thursday morning in Mountain View), I decided it was a good time to put together a screencast in Japanese demoing the use of the new Japanese parser and commands.

This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.

I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.

Ubiquity: Command the Web with Language 言葉で操作する Web from mitcho on Vimeo.

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Here’s a quick screencast highlighting some of the changes to Parser 2 and the updated Parser 2 Playpen. This video should be particularly useful to people hoping to add their language to Parser 2. It’s also a good reference for Ubiquity core developers.

Changes to Ubiquity Parser 2 + Playpen from mitcho on Vimeo.

All the features covered, as with all Parser 2 features, require that you get the latest Ubiquity code from our Mercurial repository.

I just made a screencast with Foxkeh to demo the Ubiquity next generation parser demo and to demonstrate how easy it is to add your own language. Foxkeh wants you to localize the parser into your language. How could you say no? ^^

Foxkeh demos Ubiquity Parser: The Next Generation from mitcho on Vimeo.

There are some details which are not covered in this introductory video, such as how to deal with case marking languages or languages without spaces. Hopefully this’ll inspire some people to play with the demo, though. I’d love to hear your comments! ^^

I created a new Ubiquity command that gives you super fast access to your MySQL database’s data: select.

select Command for Ubiquity from mitcho on Vimeo.

Get the command and set it up here.