the march of tech productivity continues

For those who are fans of hyperproductivity app Quicksilver, Mozilla Labs has a treat for you! Ubiquity is a browser-side command interface that lets you manipulate things you see in your browser (currently, Firefox only). By pressing CTRL+Space, you bring up a command line in which you can type, say “weather chevy chase, md” to bring up the weather in a translucent popup. Or you can highlight a bunch of listings on craigslist, press CTRL+Space, type “map these”, and instantly see a google map with the selected listings plotted.

Even my words of amazement can’t do it justice. Look at this demo video. And then marvel, because it’s a 0.1 release.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The only downside to the platform is that it’s not OS-wide. I would have to switch to Firefox on my Mac and keep it open to take advantage of the features. So it doesn’t do file management or work with any other apps–something Quicksilver does so well. But still, we’re getting so much closer to the point where we can simply speak or type a command into our computers and get precisely the information we want in the form we desire.

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