A commenter on a previous post asks,

Also, have you thought about implementing the equivalent of *ix pipes on this?

I have thought about it extensively.

Not only that, I snuck a very, very preliminary version of pipes into Ubiquity 0.1. Try this!

  1. Issue “trans hello to korean”. Hit Enter to execute it.
  2. With nothing selected, issue “email it to “.


You see what happens? The word “it” is a magic word. (And not just because “it” can defeat the Knights Who ‘Til Recently Said “Ni”). When Ubiquity finds an “it”, it looks for things the user might be referring to. If you have some text (or a chunk of a web page) selected, “it” refers to the selection. But if there’s no selection, “it” refers to the output of the previous command.

(There’s actually a whole list of magic words — “it”, “this”, “selection”, even “him” or “her” — Ubiquity treats these all the same way as it does “it”.)

Because there’s a chance that the user doesn’t want the selection or the output of the previous command, but really just wants to email the word “it” to somebody, Ubiquity also produces a literal parsing of the sentence with no interpolation. The literal interpretation appears in the suggestion list right below the one that uses the selection, so if you don’t want to use your selection, you can get the literal sentence by tapping the down-arrow key.

One problem with this feature that we’ve noticed already is that it’s too easy to accidentally get your selection, or the output of a previous command, when you don’t want it. You might be typing a long sentence with the word “it” in the middle, and not even realize that interpolation is happening until you’ve already hit “enter” and it’s too late.

So! It’s very basic, clunky to use, completely non-discoverable, easy to trigger by accident, and implemented in a terrible hacky way (”output of previous command” is literally just a single global text buffer), but at least there’s a way to send the output of command 1 to the input of command 2! So very primitive pipe-like functionality does exist.

Among other much-needed improvements, I want to make it possible to put both commands in a single line of input, using “and” as another magic word that acts like a pipe character for that pseudo-natural-language goodness:

trans hello to korean and email it to mom

Also, it’s pretty lame that you currently can’t use the pipe mechanism if you have a selection (because the selection, if there is one, always takes precedence over any previous-command-output.) You should be able to type “it” and have all three choices: the selection, the output-of-previous-command, or the literal word “it”.

Next, you should be able to use multiple, persistent, named buffers to do stuff like this:

trans this to korean and remember it as kr-text
twitter kr-text
encrypt kr-text with mom's public key and remember it as kr-crypto and email it to mom
remember selection as my-address
email my-address to mom
insert kr-crypto
etc!

It’s the equivalent of redirecting output to a named file, as you *-nix mavens no doubt already noticed.

Finally, we can do a lot more with this conept than just re-implementing the Bash shell inside your browser. There’s a very simple and powerful underlying idea here: that you should be able to type a pronoun and have the interface guess what the pronoun refers to.

Sure, the interface isn’t going to guess right all the time. But that’s why we have a suggestion list: if the first guess is wrong, the user can get to the correct interpretation with a couple of down-arrow keystrokes. So guessing wrong about what a pronoun means is a very low-cost error.

There are so many data sources that Ubiquity could pull from in order to guess the referents of pronouns! We’re not limited to just the output of the previous command and the user’s current selection. We can build up a “short-term memory” in the browser that holds all the things the user has recently interacted with, because these are clues as to what the user is thinking about, and therefore clues to what the user might be referring to when they use a pronoun in a sentence.

For example, data sources that could be part of the short-term memory include:

  • the current URL
  • the user’s recent browsing history (potentially accessible through Weave)
  • the user’s bookmarks (also accessible through Weave)
  • any other data that makes it into Weave in the future, such as contact lists
  • microformats embedded in the page
  • the inputs and outputs of my last ten commands
  • etc, etc, etc!

So for example, suppose you’re using Awesome Future Ubiquity and you type “email it to her”. Awesome Future Ubiquity should be smart enough to realize that the word “her” always refers to a person, so it looks through its short-term memory for a piece of data that might refer to a person. It could look for a microformat in the current page that describes a person, as well as looking through the people who are synchronized in your Weave account, and people you have referred to in recent commands, and come up with a list of the top five people it thinks you might mean, sorted based on your recent e-mailing history.

One of the many reasons that using computers is so annoying is because computers can’t figure out what you mean even when it would be incredibly obvious to a human. They have no ability to guess your intentions from context. It’s time to challenge the assumption that computers have to be this way.