Re:Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't...
by sly010 on Saturday May 14, 2016 @09:13AM
(#11695957)
Ubiquity was ppioneered by Aza Raskin (son of Jess Rasking, designer the original Mac interface). I always had the feeling that uqiquity never was a Mozilla project per say, it was more his personal project that he happened to do inside Mozilla. Perhaps he left or got promoted and the project stopped. I am only guessing.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't...
by digi_owl on Saturday May 14, 2016 @09:38AM
(#11696053)
The Mac interface has little to do with Ubiquity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQDfpw97Tz0
This is Aza demoing the beta version, and to me it seems to build more on Archy than anything WIMP.
Re:Ask HN: What's the best tool you used to use that doesn't...
by sly010 on Thursday May 19, 2016 @10:34AM
(#11730497)
Apologies, I wasn't trying to imply a connection between the Mac interface and Ubiquity, just wanted to put Aza's love for UX in context by mentioning his father's work. I also didn't know about Archy.
It was sort of like a launcher in a browser combined with IFTTT. You could use it to chain together APIs and reduce them to natural language commands.
You could highlight "abogado," translate it, get a map to the nearest one, shorten the url to that map, and email that shortened url to a friend all with one nearly natural language command.
I'm not that great at coding, but even I was able to write a few scripts (verbs?) for it. The simple scripting language for interacting with APIs was one of the most well crafted things about that project.