By Percy Cabello Mozilla
Taskfox announced a new project that aims to provide some of Ubiquity commands in future versions of Firefox.As you probably know, Ubiquity is a powerful extension developed by Mozilla Labs, which provides a command line interface to connect content (keywords, images, text, addresses, dates, etc..) Of a web page to another , making it easier to perform tasks common as mail a selection to a friend, add an event to an online calendar, check the weather report, or do a search, entering the appropriate command for Ubiquity, and optionally an operator as search terms or an e-mail .
This extension is proving to be quite popular, with about 200 thousand daily users today, according to numbers provided by the post Blair McBride [en] Mozilla Lab
Blair's post also shows some important considerations to keep in mind that I summarize below:
While
- Ubiquity is not for everyone (it is designed for advanced web users, with good English daily users of extensions), Taskfox is planned for any Firefox user.
- For security reasons, do not include the option to subscribe to commands, the integration of new commands will be done through a service upgrade, with performance improvements.
- as ubiquity, is extensible, so supplementation should have an API to access Taskfox opportunities. I guess users will be able to add your own command, but I'm not sure the Ubiquity command editor will be included.
- be traced, both in the integrated services, such as command lines.
- will be distributed with far fewer commands to Ubiquity.
There are three proposals to merge the CLI (Command Line Interface), with the Firefox UI, thanks to Alex Faaborg [en] :
My favorite, use the address bar, making the button go display a menu where users can choose what to do with what they have entered (to go to a URL, search using a search engine installed, find a location, add to the calendar, check the weather report, etc.)..
Users have the option of entering the command name if you are easier, and as in Ubiquity, a preview of results are displayed in a menu.
The third option is to leave things like Ubiquity, a window appears with a separate command, which is the main reason I do not use both Ubiquity: I find it somewhat redundant among many bars.
can see the details of all sketches here [in] .
The Taskfox publication date is planned for July, with betas and quality tests during May and June, appearing in the trunk of Firefox 3.6.
are invited to all those who are interested in this project, the Taskfox weekly meetings every Thursday afternoon (Pacific time), and share your thoughts and comments on the implementation of the interface in the group mozilla.dev.app.firefox or on IRC channel # fx-team .