Friday, June 13th, 2008
PodiPodi: Enso / Quicksilver for the Web
Category: Widgets
carlo from the PodiPodi team pointed us to their work: an embeddable keyboard-driven interface inspired by Humanized Enso (which comes close to bringing Quicksilver to Windows).
Their playground shows the jQuery-powered tool in action. Dion and I are big fans of Quicksilver; I would love to see this catch on and be embedded all over the web. It’s not very extensible at the moment (at least, through a formal API) but the team has plans to add customization, etc. in the future.
3.6 rating from 24 votes
So by bring Quicksilver to Windows you mean something like Launchy (http://www.launchy.net/) which has been around for quite some time?
Hmm. This is a neat idea, but I don’t see much in that list of commands that I think people would ever want to do. And unless some huge sites add it, it seems prohibitively difficult to train users to hit Shift-Z.
And yeah, Launchy is the best. Love it.
Using quicksilver/enso clone in the browser makes sense not on a webpage but as an extension. As you say, this would only be practical if a lot of webpages added this. That’s why I have been doing something very similar as a Firefox extension.
I first wrote a blogpost describing this idea nearly an year ago. Since then, the project was in hibernation for a while but recently, I have started re-coding it and I should be done in a couple weeks. Do check it out.
P.S. Sorry for the shameless self-promotion
Hey everybody thanks for the comments on PodiPodi we really need them in order to make it better. One of the major change you could see in the future, before releasing the final version, is the shift from Shift+Z to Shift+Space.
Shift+Z could be pressed often while shift+spacebar is quite never used and shouldn’t bring to suddenly open or close the interactive boxes.
What do you think about it? Any further suggestions?
Thanks!
carlo
PodiPodi team
Shift-Space is “scroll up”. Don’t mess with it.
As I commented earlier, I managed to finish up my extension for Firefox that is similar to PodiPodi in its functionality. Please check it out here