Mozilla has released the latest version of the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox 3.5. Ubiquity basically brings up a menu that lets you perform a number of actions using natural language commands. For example, you can use Ubiquity to exit or restart Firefox, switch tabs, or perform other actions in the browser. But you can also use Ubiquity to interact with web services. Here are just a few things you can do from the Ubiquity menu (which you bring up by hitting Ctrl+Spacebar after installing the plugin):
- Add an event to Google Calendar
- Check the weather for a given location
- Begin composing Gmail messages to a person in your contact list
- Translate text from one location to another
- Map a location
- Update your Twitter status
- Submit a page to Digg or delicious
- Shorten a link with TinyURL
- Search the web
Ubiquity 0.5 includes an updated instruction set that's designed to make the natural-language tool even more natural, especially for non-English speakers. There's also a new experimental suggestion feature that will, for example, suggest Yelp when you enter "pasta" or "pad thai." Suggestions aren't enabled out of the box, you'll have to enable this feature in the settings.
On the down side, Ubiquity 0.5
doesn't support the third party commands written for earlier versions of the plugin. Developers are being encouraged to update those commands, but in the meantime, you can choose to download
Ubiquity 0.1.9 which was launched yesterday as well if you want third party support.
Tags: firefox, mozilla, ubiquity, ubiquity-0.5
