Whether you’re an SEO, a developer, or just a bit of a geek, you’ve probably accumulated half a dozen firefox plugins over the years that slowed your browser down to a crawl. If like me you switched to Chrome, you’ve replaced some of these plugins with a pile of bookmarks instead – the browser stays fast but actually using it for work is a hassle. Quix, unleashed by Yoast last week, is a solution to these problems – an extensible bookmarklet that gives you toolbar/bookmark functionality with just keyboard commands.
What does that mean?
Well, say you’re using Chrome and you’ve got no toolbars, but you want to see the number of backlinks according to Yahoo! Just open Quix, type in the relevant keyboard shortcut (yl), and hey presto – you’re taken to a Site Explorer results page.
Time saving? Easy to use? When you spend half your day exploring the innards of the web this can only be a good thing. Not only that, but it’s extensible (i.e., if you’re a smartypants you can create your own commands) – if Quix doesn’t do something you need, you can improve it yourself 
Yoast was kind enough to answer a few questions on his new bookmarklet:
We first saw Quix at Think Visibility in September (and were sworn to secrecy) – did you develop Quix with Marketers in mind?
Well to be honest, Quix was designed with me in mind: it scratched an itch I had and seemed like a great way to integrate a lot of my tools into one. After showing it to a couple of friends, it became pretty obvious this is something a lot of web power users wanted. Among those power users will be a lot of marketers, as the tool comes with a pretty hefty set of built in commands for marketers because of my own background, but I think a lot of web developers will benefit from it too.
It seems like Quix could give people cool functionality on the browser of their choice – does it work across all browsers?
Yes, even on your iPhone! I’ve got a pretty good write up about how to use it with the different big browsers out their on the browser page (http://quixapp.com/browsers/)
I’m not so technical – is there a tutorial on how to create my own commands?
Not another one than on the Syntax page, but I probably need to cook one up
Are you going to add more commands to the plugin?
Of course, I’ve added 4 or 5 since launch already! If you’ve got good ideas, please do submit them either on Twitter or through getsatisfaction.
An introduction to Quix
Final thoughts
So, I’m giving Quix a go in my working day and so far it’s a neat little app. I always thought when Chrome came out that I’d miss toolbars, but that kinda seems like the old way of doing things now. Typing commands into the Chrome address bar and using shortcuts to perform operations with Quix puts an impressive arsenal at your fingertips. It’s an intuitive way of working, it’s faster, and it feels like the future
January 31st, 2010 at 7:19 pm
It sounds pretty nice. I’m giving a try. Thx.