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Is Mozilla Ubiquity Dead?
darthcamaro writes "Remember Mozilla Ubiquity? It was an effort to bring natural language commands to the Firefox browser. Now after almost two years of development and a half million downloads, the project is no longer being actively developed. Project founder Aza Raskin is now working on other projects, including Mozilla Jetpack, so Ubiquity is on the back burner. '"There is huge demand for being able to connect the Web with language — to not have to move from one site to another to complete your daily tasks," Raskin said. "And there is huge demand for anyone to be able to write small snippets of code that lets them command the Web the way they want. Ubiquity gave everyday developers a voice with how the browser and the Web works."'"
Remember Mozilla Ubiquity?
No.
#DeleteChrome
yes in theory. in practice, this what i've seen. even in a corporate environment where people are paid to maintain and enhance the old code, the new developers never quite "get it". they are able to fix bugs and add features all right, but it's done with without a vision of the overall project. the result is the code slowly loses maintainability and eventually needs to be re-written (or tossed).
maybe this is poor engineering, but it could also just be physiological. developers are less interested in code when they do not feel ownership. coming in and learning someone else's methodology that you probably don't agree with or even like is just not fun. when developers are paid to do it, they get the job done but don't follow through with the care they would otherwise have if they wrote the code from scratch.
Not trying to be an annoying "see, I knew this" jerk, but really, this project was so far reaching and poorly defined in how much it should cover, that it was hard to even grasp what the end result should be, and thus also how to support the project. I'm not sure about others, but I have a much easier time building excitement for a project I know what the end result is supposed to be like, than something where the focus is on writing abstract documents on how the browser should more easily be able to be told what you want, and better ignore technical URL's... or something.
Well, yeah, that's an awesome idea, and so is being able to speak to an OS in a few words, and not have to go through the annoying process of clicking on five different icons and buttons to get there.
But it's also far reaching in scope, and not enough narrowed down. There were some concrete stuff done in it, but it felt like features sprawling in different directions, with no sense of direction. Being able to surf to Google Maps more easily, etc, but really with the extension wanting to do more. Hmm.. The article goes on with this
While conceptually, Taskfox and Ubiquity might seem similar, Raskin noted that Taskfox is actually quite different than Ubiquity.
"Taskfox is integrated directly into the URL bar and has a simplified grammar," Raskin said. "It's more accurate to think of Taskfox as a separate product which is Ubiquity-inspired, which has the potential to evolve towards a richer, more Ubiquity-like interface."
Rephrased, I think Taskfox has the right idea here. Software sometimes need to evolve from something more simple, but with a well-defined feature set, and *then* into something more advanced. Or you'll get software with ill defined scope in terms of features in practice, with less motivated developers behind it. Like Windows Longhorn. Or Ubiquity.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Wesnoth isn't "shitty" nor "mediocre"
$ make available