Downloadsquad recently did a piece saying that Ubiquity was dead. It isn’t. But it did start a lot of press activity, and I answered a number of questions for this Internet News piece. Not all of those answers were used, so I thought I’d put them here for everyone to see.

Q: I just read the current status of Ubiquity post and it has left me confused. Is the Ubiquity project still ‘alive’ or is the ‘experiment’ now done and no additional big releases are set to come this year?

While I’ve come to love Javascript, I miss the syntactic beauty of Python. The stark modern minimalism of the language causes the meaning of code to float on the syntax like a feather on water. There are no extra braces, brackets, or parenthesis to saturate your visual bandwidth. In comparison, Javascript’s syntax is like the cluttered boudoir of a Victorian house: elaborate, ornate, and unnecessary. You can be left with half a dozen trailing braces and parenthesis, with no clear owner; their balance in an unstable equilibrium.

Note that I am not arguing that Javascript isn’t a beautiful or powerful language, just that its syntax is a vestigial meme left over from a time when we didn’t know better.

There was a lot of great feedback for my post Making Privacy Policies Not Suck. We are now in conversation with a whole slew of industry leaders and deep thinkers in the area of privacy (Lorrie Cranor, Jonathan Zittrain, Lauren Gelman, Ryan Calo to name a few).

With all of the work that’s been done before us, I wanted to touch on some of the way our thinking and position breaks from the mold.

Bolt On Approach

What would the web be like if you could tell it what you want to do as easily as you currently tell it where you want to go?

Mozilla Labs is starting to experiment with linguistic interfaces. That is, we’re playing around with interfaces where you type commands and stuff happens — in much the same way that you can type a location into the address bar in order to go somewhere.

I think this is cool because, for one thing, I think language-based interfaces are seriously under-explored compared to pointing-based interfaces. For another thing, I used to work on a project called Enso. Enso’s a language-based interface, where you type commands in and stuff happens. I think we got certain things right and certain things wrong in Enso’s UI design, so I want to take another crack at doing it better.

What makes a good linguistic UI?

In the concept video I recently did for laying out the interface paradigms for Firefox Mobile, I listed five guiding principals.

Lately some of us at Mozilla Labs have been experimenting with graphical keyboard user interfaces in Firefox. Our current work-in-progress is something that we’re calling Ubiquity for the time being, though the name is by no means set in stone.

Ubiquity is heavily informed by Enso, a software product developed by me and my colleagues at Humanized from 2005-07. Aside from the benefits outlined in Alex Faaborg’s blog post entitled The Graphical Keyboard User Interface, this experiment is intended to solve few other problems, one of which I’ll address in this post.

Madhava Enros and Aza Raskin discuss bookmark access for Fennec.

By azaraskin

Tags : design, fennec, firefox, session

Madhava Enros and Aza Raskin work through the design of "find in page" for Fennec.

By azaraskin

Tags : fennec, find, firefox, mobile