UI

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Ubiquity - A New Direction in Web UI

Mozilla labs has released a slick new Firefox extension called Ubiquity that aims to streamline the most common tasks you do in your browser as well as make things that seemed otherwise overly difficult or complicated, much more easier. I've seen it being called everything from "Quicksilver for Firefox" to "mashups for dummies". There's plenty of buzz around the net to fill you in on the details, so I won't go into that here.

I certainly like what I see in Ubiquity. It goes way beyond what Quiksilver does (or can do) and its more thant just a "mashup". Its capabilities are virtually limitless. But, what I've liked most so far about Ubiquity is how easy it is to extend. In a matter of about an hour I saw the headline on reddit about "the future of the web browser", watched Aza's cool video, wrote two simple, trivial commands, published my commands, and watched as over a dozen different people (whom I don't know nor didn't pay) downloaded and began using those commands. That says a lot about the tool and the creators over at Mozilla labs.

Its definitely something to check out if you haven't done so already.

Oh, and about those commands. The first allows you to submit any page you're on to the W3C's markup validator. Just ubiq "validate" and hit enter. You can catch that one here.

The last command I wrote is basically a shortcut to Drupal's API. Ubiq "drupal" followed by a core function, file name, constant, global or topic, hit enter and you'll land softly on the correct Drupal API page.

Drupal API Ubiquity Command

One last thing, if you haven't heard about the IE Death March, go show your support.

Using the URL as Part of Your UI

One of the projects I'm currently working on uses ActiveReload's LightHouse application for bug tracking. Its a fairly straightforward web application written in Ruby on Rails that sells itself as "Simple to the bone" bug tracking.

This week I was tasked with working on several bugs and went into Lighthouse, ticket number in hand, ready to get started. Once I log in, I navigated to the "Tickets" page and the search form I'm presented with looks like this...

Lighthouse Search Form

My first inclination was to put the ticket number right into the search box. No go. That didn't work, so I checked out the dropdown to the right of the search box with no sticking out at me. I then moved on to the "help" link at the end of the form where I learned they provide some pretty cool ways to search tickets... by tags, milestone, status, and even provide natural language date-based searched such as "5 days ago" or "since 1 week ago". All of these you can combine to form fairly complex searches. However, I still couldn't find a way to put in a simple ticket number and find my ticket.

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