Last Friday night at 10pm, Mozilla Italia had the pleasure to host Aza Raskin of Mozilla Labs in Rome. Not only the man is a very smart and talented guy, but he is also a very kind person. We set up a pub to accommodate a large number of people, but due to the very short notice and the almost holiday period, in the end we were all sitting at the same table and maybe this wasn't as bad as we thought...

This is the presentation we had:

It was actually the presentation Aza made the same morning in front of 300 people (but we didn't manage to get any other detail about it) ending with a short resume of the famous concept demo on the FF mobile interface still on the drawing board, the little genius made us salivating about some glimpses of what the future holds not just for Firefox, but for the Web in general. You can also find a small graphical appendix, but still very fascinating, which goes under the name Algorithm Ink. But the real best part of the event was the presentation, even if only partial due to internet connection, of Ubiquity. By reading the small wiki page, you would treat it as a trifle. When you see it in action, you are simply blown away... If you have ever seen Enso, another brainchild of Aza, try to mix it with Mozilla Weave, Tamarin and to move the application space of Enso from the desktop to the whole world wide web. You'll end up having an Enso on steroids, customizable with no limit due to Tamarin, which can interact with local and remote applications or using the web, and can use web contents from different origins, and so on, and everything happens through a simple command line. A stupid example because right now I can't imagine another one: select some text and/or images on the web, open ubiquity and enter "email goofy via yahoo": et voilà, the selected text and images are emailed to goofy@email.address using Yahoo webmail... Otherwise you can write your own small action called “bug”: you open the source console, add your “bug()” function to the list of available commands using a language similar to JavaScript capable of executing many different operations. The nice thing is that Ubiquity learns what you want it to do and by using Weave everything is saved on Mozilla servers with a double encryption, so that you and only you can access those data and operations. Do you want to share the newly creates function with others? Simply make it public! It's really hard explaining in words something that must be seen with your own eyes: maybe another simile we can use are Unix pipes used to connect different applications together and manage to flow of informations. That's probably what best describes what Ubiquity is, even if it doesn't look so stunning if you don't see it working. To give you a small idea about the potential of this “magic wand”, you should think of ubiquity as the tool which will enable you to customize not only web sites navigation, but also the presentation of their contents (e.g. microsummaries, microformats, etc.). Possibilities seem to be really countless. Before we forget, it looks like they are well over milestone 2 as noted on the wiki page... Oh, the thing works already in local with FF3 and remotely on ubiquity site... Do you want to know how big ubiquity is in its “base” version? A few hundreds of lines of code, including empty rows and rows with only closing braces for functions... Try to be more expressive than that... Other interesting details are in our opinion the creation in the near future of some sort of a brainstorming site, similar to what already happens with Dell and Ubuntu (so that everybody can suggest ideas and discuss other peoples' ideas), and the increased attention paid to local communities which are the first think-tank Mozilla has at its disposal. In conclusion, on one hand we felt sorry about the small number of people who were present, but on the other hand it was really an exciting experience! See you next time Aza, and thank you!
(Written by Giacomo Magnini)