Initial Impressions of 0.5

[mattcoz]

I quickly just started typing away some commands, not knowing what
would do what, just to see what would happen and how close it comes to
what I would expect.

1. I don't like how it defaults to setting a tag when a command is
unknown. I could misspell something and set a tag when I didn't mean
to. I think it should default to doing nothing, although still
offering suggestions, and not closing the overlay.

2. Being able to type "search" is nice, but could it support typing
"search for" without including "for" in the search?

3. Would be nice if commands like "what is" worked. It seems more
natural than "define".

4. I tried typing "yelp" and it showed the command with "(restaurant)
(near address)", although when I typed anything after "yelp" it went
away and tried to add a tag.

5. In fact, it seems that a lot of the examples don't work. I tried
"add 3pm lunch to calendar" and it tried to add "3pm lunch to
calendar" to my calendar.

6. How do I enable the experimental suggestions? It says to do so on
the settings page, but it isn't there.

[Brandon Pung]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the feedback, it's really appreciated. I'll go through and address your points below.

1. I don't like how it defaults to setting a tag when a command is
unknown.  I could misspell something and set a tag when I didn't mean
to.  I think it should default to doing nothing, although still
offering suggestions, and not closing the overlay.

It's not exactly that ubiquity defaults to using "tag" when a command is unknown, it's rather a result of the scoring algorithms that are in place which are causing "tag" to consistently be the top result when no other verbs are matching well. We will certainly address this soon when we tweak our scoring algorithms.

2. Being able to type "search" is nice, but could it support typing
"search for" without including "for" in the search?

This should currently be supported. Can you give me an example input in which it is not giving you the desired behavior?

3. Would be nice if commands like "what is" worked.  It seems more
natural than "define".

Ubiquity does support commands have multiple possible names. We can certainly look at adding more of these common synonyms to our built-in commands. "What is" being another name for "define" sounds like a good one to me.

4. I tried typing "yelp" and it showed the command with "(restaurant)
(near address)", although when I typed anything after "yelp" it went
away and tried to add a tag.

This is because the thing you type after yelp is being looked up in yelp's restaurants database using an api call. If it doesn't find your input in the restaurant database, then it's telling Ubiquity that your input is not a restaurant and thus yelp shouldn't be suggested anymore. So if you're in the middle of typing "yelp pasta" and you've typed "yelp pas" it looks up "pas" on yelp, sees that this is not a restaurant, and removes the yelp suggestion. However, if you finish typing pasta such that your input is now "yelp pasta" it will look up "pasta" on yelp, find that it does match a restaurant, and yelping the restaurant "pasta" should become your top recommendation. This disappearance of the recommendation in intermediate stages of typing is an issue we are currently addressing, as it is not ideal behavior. So this should be fixed in a near future release.

5. In fact, it seems that a lot of the examples don't work.  I tried
"add 3pm lunch to calendar" and it tried to add "3pm lunch to
calendar" to my calendar.

Good catch. This is likely either a scoring problem or a problem with our date/time noun type. We'll look into this.

6. How do I enable the experimental suggestions?  It says to do so on
the settings page, but it isn't there.

It's on the settings page (chrome://ubiquity/content/settings.html) under Miscellanous Settings on the right side. It's the checkbox for "Enable external calls for all Parser 2 queries". Note that it's still very experimental and kinks are still being worked out.

Thanks again!

-Brandon

--
Brandon James Pung
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Class of 2010
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
828.777.8640 | bp...@mit.edu