Inky: A Sloppy Command Line for the Web with Rich Visual Feedback

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Summary:
In this paper, Robert C. Miller, et al. (researchers at MIT CSAIL and the University of Southampton) present Inky (short for Internet Keywords), which is basically a command line interface that provides shortcuts to common web browser tasks.  It functions as a hybrid between a command line and GUI interface, giving dynamic visual feedback to the user as they type and utilizing sloppy syntax which frees the user from learning any new command syntax.  Keywords can be provided in any order, replaced with synonyms, or entered in a variety of ways; the Inky interpreter attempts to match the user's input against available commands.  Inky is a Firefox extension built using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Java, and XML.  The various construction, command, and content-highlighting specifics are discussed in the rest of the paper, covering details about the keyword interpreter, functions and usage.

The authors conducted a small user study of seven participants and found that 95 out of 131 user commands were correctly interpreted, and that Inky was fairly easily learnable based on user response.  Most of the commands that were not correctly interpreted were simply attempts by users to invoke commands that did not exist (by entering website names, for example).  The researchers used their findings about Inky to begin development on a second prototype called Pinky (Personal Information Keywords) which focuses on lightweight data capture for personal information management.


Discussion:
My first thought about this application was that it seemed an awful lot like Quicksilver for Mac -- an application launcher/wizard's tool that interprets user input to execute commands and launch applications.  This paper even mentions Quicksilver, in fact, when talking about how Inky is invoked.  It also shares many similarities with Mozilla's own Ubiquity.  Like, a lot of similarities.  As in, these tools are nearly identical in function and aim.  Having used Quicksilver and Ubiquity pretty extensively, I think a command-line-style interface for quick command execution is a great idea that can really streamline a user's experience (if they are willing to take on a small learning curve).