Mozilla Lab recently released Ubiquity, it aims to lower the threshold for Web mashup. The following clips demonstrates how Ubiquity works in action:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

The 0.1 version is pretty much the prototype, but still quite inspiring. As more and more application have migrated from the desktop to the cloud, some may consider to replicate the OS to WebOS, others try to glue different pieces together to stop reinventing the wheel. Ubiquity takes the second approach, and seems quite promising.

As a die-hard command line user, I really love the simplicity of Ubiquity. And hopefully the following features may emerge later:

• Wrap another command add prologue and epilogue, glue several commands together for a new functionality.
• Pipe or we could do this in-place by using Pipe.
• Drag-n-drop from the Ubiquity to the web page, and vice versa.
• Nohup, fg, bg and screen full job controls for a quick response for BIG jobs, goes too far?

Any idea of new commands that make your life easier?

Today one website I usually visit requires me to upgrade the Adobe Flash player, and in fact, I just did recently n the emerge world. From the output of the Firefox about:plugins output, I seems to have more than one Flash player installed:

It is a little bit overkill to launch strace as Firefox considerately leaves the option to expose the full path by enabling plugin.expose_full_path in about:config, this is the screenshot after netscape-flash-9.0.124.0 is un-emerged:

Seems I did manually install the flash-7.0r63 in the home directory that overrides the system-wide Flash plugin. Once it is removed, and 9.0.124.0 is re-emerged, everything works.

BTW, if you happen to be a Flash developer, and would need to install multiple versions of Flash player, it is may be worthy taking a look at Flash Switcher as well.

It has been the biggest headache to configure Linux desktop environment to display sharp Chinese glyphs. Personally, I would rather trace the segmentation errors rather than setup the Chinese font. For years, I was satisfied with the bottom line, i.e to browse the Chinese web page using Firefox, input Chinese when necessary.

It is quite embarrassing to stick to the ugly Chinese display as a geek, I would summarize my efforts to configure the Chinese fonts.
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Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug are two must-haves for the Web developers, I will introduce another powerful debugger, venkman later.

Web Developer Toolbar

This all-in-one toolbar gears towards getting the Web designer out of the tedious work, such as fine-tuning CSS, troubleshooting block layout, validating to the Web standards. My favorite functionality is Display Element Informaton, the Ctrl-Shift-f shortcut will call a yellow box, once the element is clicked, its attributes are shown in the yellow box, quite nifty.

FireBug

The official website have a very detailed introduction of the FireBug. Further more, the prototype’s author demonstrates the FireBug in action here. Unlike Error Console, the FireBug expose the targeted window’s document node to the global scope, therefore, the developer can test the JavaScript code snippet in the console without hassle.

The console supports one-line command, when you click the Up button on the right, a multi-line textbox is popped out for multiply line code editing. What a considerate design!

This post is for the real poor Web developers who even could not install add-ons on Firefox, at least, there are two spartan debuggers available:

DOM Inspector

A neat tool to demonstrate the DOM structure of the Web page. It is far less attractive than the Web Developer Toolbar’s Display Element Information. However, you might find it useful to inspect the add-on’s XUL.

Error Console

Error Console supports to evaluate the JavaScript snippet directly. However, the targeted window’s document is not exposed in the global scope, that cripple the usability of this tool and push me to embrace FireBug.
Please leave a comment if I am wrong.