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.
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