There's a cool tool that's just come out called Ubiquity, a plugin for Firefox (get the prototype here) that lets you do some really powerful stuff. It's created by one of the leading UI designers, Aza Raskin, who now does work for Mozilla Labs including creating the interface for the upcoming mobile version of Firefox. Here's the most concise way to describe Ubiquity, from the Mozilla Labs announcement:
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 message composition 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.Ubiquity aims to make the task described much easier by providing an interface that can combine all the information for you, and drop it into your email. And emails are just one example of the usefulness.
In an example more relevant to my own recent apartment search, I remember what a hassle it was going through Craigslist search results and having to map each page individually using Google Map links on each listing. In the sample video below, he just highlights the results he wants and can map them all at once...Ubiquity will follow each link, find the location, and group them all together on a Google Map, all using a single command. Pretty powerful stuff.
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
