V

I understand that in a practical point of view it’s better than point n’ click solutions, but we as programmers and engineers need to try and put ourselves in the shoes of the people we’re trying to ’sell’ to.

The smaller the learning curve, the easier it is to market to customers. Only a handful of people would appreciate the reasons behind solutions that require a steeper learning curve.

I think having Ubiquity outside the browser makes a lot of sense, and also mostly obviates the need for writing different versions for different browsers.

Also, the only reason I use so many different browsers is because I work on web applications for a living, so the value of having cross-browser portability wouldn’t be nearly as high for non-developers.

This is really cool. Being a Python guy, this makes me excited. Did you see that the beta versions of Ubiquity now also has the ability to write commands in Python? As well as having Ubiquity run outside the browser?

We’d love your help getting Ubiquity to work across all browser platforms.

Nifty post. As a user interface issue, I think it’s worth exploring these sorts of options. People tend think that point-and-click GUI’s are more “intuitive” for people to use but once people become familiar with the software, a few keyboard-only commands become very useful in making common tasks very efficient.

As a simple example, managers at Bain used to say that if you used your mouse too much, they’d take it away to force you to learn the keyboard shortcuts in excel. Mostly because learning just a few keyboard shortcuts could boost productivity by a huge factor — heading to your mouse to make 3 or four clicks (menu-command-options) takes much more time than just click alt-i-e or some combination. Same reason why learning a few commands in emacs or vim can make you super fast.

On a side not, this is kind of strange, but I do believe you were the first person to teach me about quick seraches back when you were showing me the first release of Firefox.

-Vince