After looking at PodiPodi yesterday there was an obvious problem of context, which brought up a very valid question, “why would someone want to do a google/yahoo/whatever search while on your page and have the results displayed as an overlay on top of your page?” There’s just no real point to it or value added to your site, so it seems really useless and as Ryan said, “just meant to be a flashy addition to a website.”
I found another program called Devo that solves this problem. Well, sort of… I’ll get to that later. It’s a Firefox extension that gives you basically the exact same UI (you press Shift+X or set the trigger command to whatever you want it to be instead of it always being Shift+Space) and allows you to search google, yahoo, flickr, wikipedia along with several other sites. There are also a few other cool features like annotating a site through SharedCopy. Those are all cool, but what I think really makes this stand out is that it allows you to create your own commands.
So, back to the contextual problem; I still see it here. These commands are only available when Firefox is open. What if you boot up your computer and you want to immediately do a google search, without having to open Firefox? What if you want to use that same UI to do something in another application, like notepad, iTunes, or internet explorer? I think that ultimately Enso solves the entire contextual problem because it’s a small program you download and install on your computer. This makes it computer-wide, so you can use it within any application you want to.
As for the features that Enso packs, it has all the web searches you could ask for. There are media controls to control your music (which Devo also has, however you must have the FoxyTunes Firefox plugin). There’s the spellcheck command which will do a spellcheck on any text you have highlighted, and since this is computer-wide it brings spellcheck to every application on your computer, which is pretty damn cool if you ask me. There’s also the launcher commands which, if I’m remembering correctly, crawls your computer for applications to run and adds them to the launcher so to open the calculator you can type, “open calculator” or “open calc” since the auto-complete will fill in the rest.
I really like these command based UI’s that allow users to do what they want to do quickly, without losing focus of the task at hand or having to reach for the mouse, keeping the UI pretty (not like a command shell), and keeping the commands easily readable by humans. I think that once more and more people start using these, they’ll realize how helpful these tools can actually be.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:39 am
But what if I want to do a Google search without having to boot up my computer?
WHAT THEN?
Enso is still very limiting - I have to have a computer before I can do anything! The contextual problem is far from over - if anything we see just how limited in scope it is.
What if I’m watching TV and want to know who some actor is? Could I search from my TV? What if I don’t even own a TV? We obviously have a long way to go.
July 23rd, 2008 at 9:58 am
Sure, you could keep zooming the context out and look at some situation and say “what about that?” At some point there has to be a “well then you’re shit out of luck” answer.
What if I’m on a planet orbiting Betelgeuse and I want to update my twitter status to let everyone know I’ve found intelligent life on another planet? What then? “well then you’re shit out of luck.”
In terms of these three programs (PodiPodi, Devo and Enso), I think Enso is the best at increasing your productivity on the computer.
July 23rd, 2008 at 10:21 am
Google just needs to release GBrain.
July 23rd, 2008 at 1:26 pm
You left out Launchy!
July 23rd, 2008 at 2:05 pm
@RyanTheRobot, Cool, I saw something about launchy when I found devo but I didn’t have a chance to try it out. I’ll mess with it later. Do you use it?
July 23rd, 2008 at 6:52 pm
Hey,
Thanks for writing about my extension. :)
I designed Devo based on Enso and it is only meant to support Firefox (so I really don’t want my context to be system-wide). This is mostly because Enso lacks the ability to do many things that a Firefox extension can like getting easy access to bookmarks and Firefox history. Plus, firefox extensions can run on multiple platforms.
Anyway, I use Quicksilver for controlling the rest of my computer. You should try it if you have a Mac. It’s totally awesome but its based on a different paradigm compared to Enso.
July 24th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Hey Abi, thanks for commenting.
It is true that a system-wide implementation doesn’t have easy access to browser specific data. Looking over the commands of Devo, though there are no built in commands using that information, granted someone could write them.
With Firefox 3’s new address bar, I think they manage searching through that data and pulling up pages in your history very simple and elegant.
I’ll definitely give Quicksilver a try. I just installed Launchy (it’s supposed to be the windows equivalent of Quicksilver) and I really like it.
July 29th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Seriously, Launchy is the best. I don’t know how I lived my life on the computer before I installed it. haha. The only problem with it is that sometimes I forget that I have it installed. :o