Huddled Masses

Posts Tagged ‘User Interface’

Announcing the release of PowerBoots 0.1

This release of PowerBoots is the most exciting release software I’ve cranked out in awhile. It finally has almost all of the features that I have thought of so far (we’re still missing proper support for attached properties).

• You can create pretty much any WPF element, including ones I haven’t thought of adding yet (use Add-BootsFunction to add a new assembly or a single type).
• You can create graphical user interfaces from PowerShell 1.0 all the way to the latest PowerShell 2.0 CTP.
• You can create your WPF GUIs -Async in their own threads, or inline in PoshConsole, or as synchronous dialogs that return values when they close.
• You can capture screenshots of your UIs (eg: generate .jpg charts from Visifire). You can even do so without displaying them!
• You can take advantage of XAML Data Templates to generate graphical representations of any objects in the PowerShell pipeline.

• You can add to, or modify your running GUIs from the command line.

You can read the “and much much more” between the lines right?

I just discovered ubiquity, a Firefox plugin from Mozilla labs which is really just a sort-of alpha concept preview of a new command-line interface for the web browser that they are working on.

It’s extremely cool

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

You should watch the video, the stuff they’re doing already is kind-of exciting. It reminded me a lot of PowerShell, so I started digging around some blogs and trying to figure out where they are going, and what their inspiration is … and now I’m really quite excited about it and you should be too. Won’t it be cool when you can tell Firefox something like:

Hey Firefox? Take this text from this page, translate it to Spanish, encrypt it with my mom’s public key, email it to her … and oh yeah save this chain of commands as a new command so I can use it later.

That’s the vision of jono over at Mozilla Labs, and it sounds pretty good to me Although I couldn’t help but think that if I could access PowerShell from my browser and pipe in the selected text, I could do pretty much all of that with existing commands

Anyway, I thought I’d give you a few links to read about the concepts of expressive, composable, linguistic, and partially graphical interfaces. And then later on, I’ll show you mine.

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• Mozilla’s Ubiquity For Firefox Alpha 0.1 Looks Fantastic
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• Speaking Coherently
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• Natural Language in your Browser