Hacker News Reader

Comment by vickychijwani | Hacker News Reader

I'm late to this thread, but quite surprised to see nobody mentioned Mozilla's Ubiquity addon [1], which I think best demonstrates the idea of "composability" in a GUI you're trying to convey. I think adding a description/screenshot of Ubiquity or explaining one of its use-cases would explain your idea more clearly and actually put someone on the right path if they accept your call to action.

Incidentally, Aza Raskin, one of the main developers of Ubiquity is the son of Jef Raskin who led the work on Apple's Macintosh.

At one point in college I was fascinated enough with Ubiquity to try to continue the work on it (since the project was shelved), but my programming skills were just not up to it. Perhaps I'll get back to it sometime soon :)

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_...

View on HN

Ubiquity (and it's related predecessor, Enso) was an excellent idea and I'd almost forgotten I'd used it for about 18 months before the project died out. Raskin took the idea from his father of course, and it's discussed in his book "The Humane Interface", one of the best books about software design ever to have been written.

Yep, The Humane Interface is already on my (apparently ever-growing) reading list! Should probably bump it up as I've seen it recommended so much. Thanks :)

I've been thinking, with all the huge advances in AI/ML in the last few years, now might be exactly the right time for an ambitious project like Ubiquity, since it relies heavily on natural-language processing. Thoughts?

My thoughts would be similar to the ones expressed by Robert Kosara (and Ben Shneiderman) on that point I think:

https://eagereyes.org/blog/2016/the-personified-user-interfa...

I can see where that's coming from, but this is a one-sided view. It misses the obvious conclusion: interface agents (to use the article's terminology) are complementary to direct manipulation interfaces, not a replacement.

Direct manipulation is great at discoverability, when I'm exploring the choices available to me, but it sucks if I'm looking for something specific (for software with a minimum level of complexity, like Photoshop or Excel). Interface agents have the opposite characteristics, as the article explains. So, they're complementary techniques.

To provide a simpler example, not involving AI: if the user is a domain expert (say, a graphic designer), the ability to search for and perform a specific action quickly is far more important than discoverability. For example, the user may already know that GIMP provides a feature for drawing a path but have only used Photoshop in the past and now they just can't find that action.

Aside: it is telling that established design software like Photoshop / GIMP has such a bewildering maze of menus even today. But if you take Google Chrome, for instance, it provides a stellar searchable user interface [1].

[1]: http://vickychijwani.me/searchable-user-interfaces-are-the-f...

I think Ubiquity is similar to 'Alt+Space' launchers. Alfred on Mac and Hain on Windows. Cerebro is a cross platform one.

On the surface, yes. But calling it a launcher does it a disservice - it was more ambitious [1] than any other launcher I've seen, although they unfortunately stopped developing it. Their ultimate goal seems to have been to build something like Unix pipes for the web, e.g., see use-cases like [2]: "insert a map for the selected location into the email I'm writing, without leaving my current tab", and this without any help from the developers of Gmail or Google Maps.

Moreover, this was way back in 2008 [3] vs I think Alfred in 2011 and the others are recent clones. I think Ubiquity was a few years ahead of its time - with today's AI advancements, they might actually be able to achieve a large part of their original mission. This has got me thinking...

[1]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity

[2]: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Latest_Ubiquity_User_...

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubiquity_(Firefox)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com