I have been buried under a rock really deep to miss the Ubiquity news. Though late, I have gone through the video and the tutorial, like a passionate Web user, and I think it is excellent work. And exciting too!
It will add to the productivity of already productive Web users. I am not so sure of the ones that aren’t. I am not pessimistic, but a bit wary of certain aspects:
- How many of us live completely off the Web? I am sure some do, but it has some heavy pre-requisites, which everyone cannot enjoy. The mashup might require a combination of Web services and desktop applications.
- Web services go down, especially the popular ones.
- Using English language is definitely user-friendly, but the users might have to learn more to be accurate with it.
Having said this, I have already started building my own commands. As I said, I am not pessimistic, but it will take some time before I will be gung-ho about it.
What I am glad about is that this probably highlights the need for a task-based interface, which I have been trying with desktops. Ubiquity is not about using applications, it is about doing tasks. However, this abstraction will take a lot of work underneath it. That is why I feel that it will be great if Ubiquity can take a form where it can communicate with desktop applications as well. Or maybe Ubiquity can be the desktop itself?
