Valhalla Island

There’s a reason programming languages don’t use natural language — it’s verbose, ambiguous and imprecise. Often, even with our advanced human brains tuned to understand language, it’s difficult to understand what another person is trying to tell you. One of the joys of programming (as with maths) is having that barrier removed, you learn the language and while you’re telling the compiler or interpreter what to do there is right and there is wrong, nothing else. Then (depending on the language) right is clear, concise, unambiguous and easy to use. For these reasons, I do not understand Mozilla’s Ubiquity.

Their primary example solves a problem that doesn’t exist. If the motivation for a project is a complicated and contrived scenario there’s already problems. Even the explanation is long-winded:

You’re writing an email to invite a friend to meet at a local San Francisco restaurant that neither of you has been to. You’d like to include a map. Today, this involves the disjointed tasks of message composition on a web-mail service, mapping the address on a map site, searching for reviews on the restaurant on a search engine, and finally copying all links into the message being composed. This familiar sequence is an awful lot of clicking, typing, searching, copying, and pasting in order to do a very simple task. And you haven’t even really sent a map or useful reviews—only links to them.

No one does this. If the recipient doesn’t know where the restaurant is, they can look it up. Then who looks at reviews for a restaurant before they go and why do you need to include a single review, about something as subjective as food, in the email? Is the recipient really going to take in the review, then come back suggesting they go somewhere else based on the review? Are you both really going to go back and forward, reading reviews and posting maps in an effort to decide where to have your lunch?

The ability to actually add a map to the email rather than paste a link isn’t helpful. It comes across as a bombardment of auxiliary information. While you’re adding maps and reviews to an email why not add dictionary definitions for words you think they might not understand or Wikipedia excerpts for things they may find interesting? Give people the raw information, they can do what they like with it.

Other examples they use to demonstrate Ubiquity include copying text and an image from a website into an email. Is this seriously something people are having trouble with? Copying and pasting on their computers?

Or making a TinyURL: bookmarklets. Defining a word: Mac OS has this built-in, system wide.

Not even their own examples of Ubiquity’s usefulness make any sense to me. I feel like I’d have to change the way I do everything online to fit it into my life. And those changes would make the things I used to do quickly, slower. Ubiquity’s goal seems to be making contrived, long-winded and superfluous tasks easier. Like a device that speeds up the process of sorting your garbage before the bin man collects it.