Webupon

Have you ever enriched your web experience with commands? If not then now would be the time to try out Ubiquity.

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension which lets you command your browser with expression strings and perform common as well as complex web activities. Once Ubiquity is installed you need to call up the console window by pressing ctrl + space.

Till date Ubiquity includes around 80 built in commands for performing activities like emailing,searching,translating, mapping etc. You can also create new commands and even share them with others.

Ubiquity would not do anything for you that you cannot already do by bringing up a Web page specific to the task. But what it surely does, it make doing things you already do much easier and faster.
Ubiquity provides a unique natural language input method which helps in reducing the learning curve for new users. As soon as you start typing,Ubiquity starts guessing what you meant and suggeststhe best match.For example, if you want to translate a word into Spanish,then just by typing ‘’tr” Ubiquity figures out that you are trying a translation. Translate has a simple syntax as follows translate (text) (from language) (to language). Translating has never been any simpler.

By default the source language is English.

Now let us see how various commands are used. Suppose you want to search Wikipedia what a “reversible reaction” is. Just type “wi” for Wikipedia searchfollowed by“reversible reaction”, your search string. The result will be displayed instantaneously in the area below the search bar.

Now let us learn how to email. You might have a Gmail account; everyone does. For this to work, you need to be logged in. Once you type “email” in the Ubiquity inbox you will see a suggestion saying “Email(message)(to contact)”.

Thus we see that email command accepts two fields.The message is what you are emailing and the contact is to who you are sending the mail.

However, you can leave out one of these things — or both of them — and the Email command will still work. So you can issue any of these commands:

“email India”

“email to John India”

Where “John” is someone in your contact list.

Suppose you have found an interesting fact on a web page and want toshare it with John. You can select part of the page, including links or pictures and email it to John in the same way as above.

Similarly map command displays the location of the place that you want to search.

There are various other commands like:

Highlight:It is used to annotate a selection with persistent highlighting.To do this, drag the cursor over the selection and type highlight into Ubiquitycommand box.

Delete:You can even delete images and text by highlighting (selecting) them and entering delete into Ubiquity inbox.

Word count: Just selecting the text and writing word count into ubiquity inbox will result into total number of words in the selected text.

As mentioned earlier,anyone can create Ubiquity commands. Once created, these commands can be embedded in any web page. If you go to the page where you have embedded your commands,Firefox willpresent you with the option of subscribing to these commands as well. One thing here, always make sure that the source is trustworthy, the last thing you want is a bot inside your browser.

It is very important to understand the dangers of subscribing Ubiquity commands from sites that are not authentic.A ubiquity command can access your web browser and your personal accountsand data might be accessible to hackers. This can seriously harm your computer.Hence a scary looking warning page appears every time we subscribe for new commands.

So start commanding the web and get your tasks done much easier than before. Use Ubiquity.