Mozilla's Ubiquity dazzlingly cool preview release promises to make commands a great deal easier to remember and use by removing those annoying hyphens. With a totally updated parser -- unimaginatively referred to as "Parser 2" Ubiquity also promises support for a ton of new languages.

"[The old parser] was based on a lot of assumptions about English that are not necessarily true in other languages", explains the preview release announcement. Spaces between words, or noun-verb ordering are more flexible under the new parser, opening Ubiquity to a non-English speaking audience and getting rid of those picky little hyphens for Anglophones.

Unfortunately, that also means a great many commands you might be used to are currently incompatible. The new version greeted me with a warning, notifying me that some commands -- known in Ubiquity parlance as "verbs" -- didn't load because of incompatibility with Parser 2. A quick look shows old verbs like "flip-page" and "desaturate-image" are in need of an upgrade.

Still, for fans of Ubiquity's slick hands-never-leave-the-keyboard workflow, this is an upgrade that's been a long time coming.

Following right after the news that Mozilla plans to integrate the powerful command-line task interface Ubiquity, there's now a TaskFox prototype and a demo video available. The prototype and the demo give you good a taste of the way people will probably interact with tasks in their browsers in the very near future. Although the appearance of the TaskFox interface is obviously pretty rough so far, this preview does cover a lot of the major things users do in Ubiquity.

TaskFox actually improves on Ubiquity in an important way: results are entire keyboard-navigable. Being able to accomplish tasks mouse-free is one of the major advantages of a product like Ubiquity, so it's exciting to see TaskFox taking it to the next level. There are also some cool "tear-off" features, where you can drag out TaskFox results that you want to leave on your screen. If this is the future of Firefox, count me in.

Ubiquity is a Firefox extension that pops up a command-line interface that lets users quickly execute common tasks, like searching or emailing something to yourself. It's like an in-browser version of Quicksilver (on a Mac) or Launchy (for Windows). Ubiquity is so useful and powerful that Mozilla is planning to integrate it into a future version of Firefox, in a project called Taskfox.

Taskfox is off to a great start with its list of goals and non-goals. It's going to try to be as natural a part of your workflow as possible, and never interrupt you -- in other words, it will make things easier to do, but it won't be that infernal paperclip from MS Word. Making it a seamless part of the Firefox experience is on the goals list, too, and I think that's the most important part. I don't think of Quicksilver as separate from the OS on my Mac anymore, and I don't see why a really good version of Ubiquity shouldn't be the same way in Firefox. On the non-goals list, Taskfox isn't making any attempt to be a separate platform, although it will have an API so you can code extensions for it, in typical Firefox style.

[via MozillaLinks]

Steve Rubel wrote an excellent post about taking your Gmail to an extraordinary new level -- using it as a searchable database by harnessing its rich filtering capabilities and imbuing it with tags. Rather than just using it as an email inbox, you can hit pay dirt if you stretch it to be your personal data mining system.

Here's how. First, forget about using the cumbersome label feature altogether. You will be using the filters and tags instead. As you will be sending yourself emails to seed your database, you will need to set up a filter so these emails are auto archived and marked as read and don't junk up your inbox.

When you find information you want to add to your database, you will email it to yourself (Rubel uses Ubiquity, a Firefox add on) with a special tag you add to the prefix. For example, youremail+mortgage crisis@gmail.com, if say you wanted to have access to a great article on the housing melt down. The email won't hit your inbox, but you can find it doing a search by its tag.

Then, to make your tags easy to find, use Gmail Quick Links, a Gmail Labs feature which bookmarks common Gmail views. This allows you to create a shortcut to any bookmarkable URL in Gmail. You need to enable this feature in your Gmail settings, found under the Labs tab.

If you live in your Gmail, this might be a great option for you to bookmark and search massive quantities of information all from the comfort of your home on the web, your inbox.