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Ubiquity is a Mozilla Lab product, which is, in fact, slick user interface in the web browser, basically meant for web applications. Until now only the product designers tried to express user's need personalizing each web app for the user. Afterall it was still meant for mass users. Ubiquity provides the platforms where the user can customize the web for himself/herself according to his/her needs. In this case, the user can take benefits of many available web API for various web applications.

Mozilla took a great step, unlike other existing browser, for customization of user's needs by implimeting AddOns to the browser experience. I personally think, this is yet another great step bringing customization to the most potential programmers, who refrained themselves from this attempt. Whoever is familiar with Quicksilver for Mac, can understand what ubiquity is all about. Quicksilver (or perhaps even Spotlight) to Mac is what like Ubiquity for Web.

Ubiquity makes use of trigger, e.g. alt+space, to appear and the user can make use of given command to do the things for which the commands are made, e.g. finding the weather, posting to Twitter, search something on Amazon, or do the calculation, etc. The user doesn't need to go to the website and simply write these commands and well, after entering it you are there with your results. It saves precious amount of time. The following video gives you better idea of how it works:

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

There are many IDL routines available for reading FITS file, a standard for astronomical data, but I have never been happy with their use for pretty simple thing of displaying the spectrum of the object. fits_read gives you the header and flux, but never the wavelength scale. readfits can also be useful, but it does so many other things, that I decided to write reading routine on my own.

Of course, I had to make use of fits_read to get the header and flux information from the FITS file. What is actually missing is the wavelength scale. So I create a wavelength array by taking header information from the FITS file. Header saves the value of the starting wavelength as CRVAL1 and the size of the increment as CDELT1. Now creating the wavelength array is not that difficult. My IDL routine is called myreadfits.pro and the source code is given below.

pro myreadfits, file, wavel, flux

fits_read, file, flux, header
crpos=where(strmid(header,0,6) eq "CRVAL1")
cr=strmid(header[crpos[0]],9,60)+0.
cdeltpos=where(strmid(header,0,6) eq "CDELT1")
cdelt=strmid(header[cdeltpos[0]],9,60)+0.
wavel=findgen(n_elements(flux))*cdelt+cr

end

There are many web services customized for iPhone experience. Sometimes they excel those for normal web browsers. They also come handy, when you are not interested in giving whole desktop just for one web service, like e.g. SocialThing! or Google Tasks. And the Safari iPhone experience is also quite sleek and very minimalistic. There is a workaround for it, where you can make these WebApps as Desktop Apps.

The solution is creating a WebApp using Fluid. Just create a normal web app as instructed. After creating it, launch it! Now what you have to do is to change the User Agent setting, so that it is recognized as Mobile Safari not as a desktop Safari. Under the application menu you can find User Agent. Now select Other... There you put the following string:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 2_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.1 Mobile/5H11 Safari/525.20

Now restart the just created application and you have iPhone optimized WebApp on Desktop. This workaround was made for Gmail Tasks, which seems to be working with other apps.

IDL, Interactive Data Language, is quite a popular scientific computing application provided by ITT Visual Information System. It's usefulness can be seen with data analysis, scientific visualization and, best of all, its cross-platform development support. There are many introductions to IDL available online. In this blog, I shall be concentrating more on its usefulness towards some applications in the Astronomy and Astrophysics.