Just a quick note to mention Ubiquity. It can be ‘quicksilver for firefox’ but it goes a lot further I think. It takes a very refreshing view to repetitive tasks we all do and renders them obsolete. For example:
You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of messagecomposition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews only links to them.
What I find impressive is the clarity of thought that could detect this as boring, repetitive and build a tool that obviates it. I’m not using Ubiquity (nor Firefox as my main browser) but this makes me consider switching.
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I tried this a couple of weeks ago. The idea is interesting, especially in terms of extensibility, and I think the terminal-like GUI really rocks. But as an ultimate fan of quicksilver, which gives you the same functionality and much more but at *OS* level (not just browser level), I’m definitely not planning to use Ubiquity on a regular basis.
How do you specify the parameters that you are interested in? Some people would be interested in food quality, and ambiance while others would be interested in price.
The concept is a great idea no doubt. You would think the software would have to be intelligent enough to learn your personal preferences first to be able to decipher your future actions and save time. Otherwise it is just a guessing game.