What’s up with Ubiquity 0.2?

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Ubiquity 0.2 is on the table for release in the very near term future. We’re talking weeks away. But, what is it? We sat down with Atul Varma, the lead developer of Ubiquity (among other things), to talk about the major changes underway.

What’s up with Ubiquity 0.2?

How To Help

The main way to help is by joining in the process of getting Ubiquity 0.1.3 out the door. Features are frozen but there are still some bugs left to quash. The full list is here.

There’s lots of things you can do to help:

If you don’t know how to code

Get the latest Ubiquity 0.1.3 release candidate to verify some of the bugs and help figure out under what conditions they occur. We could also use some people to just download the release candidate and bang on it, to find any bugs lurking in the shadows; if you find one, please feel free to file a ticket for it.

If you know how to code, feel free to assign a bug to yourself and submit a patch that fixes it. Join us on #ubiquity on irc.mozilla.org if you have any questions or want to discuss solutions with our core developers.

As soon as these are finished, we should be able to get 0.1.3 out the door, which will drastically improve the speed of Ubiquity and make it a lot prettier.

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Published:: 12.22.08 / 4pm

Category:: WEBLOG

11 Comments

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Dylan 12.22.08 / 5pm

Long time fan/reader, first time contributor.

Aza, I absolutely love Ubiquity. I think it’s brilliant, and definitely the next step in internet-user-custom-interface-api-fun.

But, please Mozilla-almighty, can someone fix that annoying window lag issue?! http://labs.toolness.com/trac/ticket/377

Starting Firefox or opening a new window with Ubiquity enabled takes 4+ seconds. This is really *really* annoying.
Aza Raskin 12.22.08 / 5pm

Hi Dylan, thanks for contributing and the kind words. As you wished, we’ve fixed ticket #377, and new windows should open fast once again with the latest release candidate. Please give it a whirl, and let us know if the problem still exists.
Henrik Skupin 12.22.08 / 6pm

Aza, there are some bugs filed on Bugzilla against Ubiquity which don’t get any attention. Could you please make sure that they are synced with the trac system or just remove the possibility to file bugs against Ubiquity on Bugzilla? Thanks.
Aza Raskin 12.22.08 / 7pm

@Henrik We’ll look into that. Thanks!
Fitech 12.22.08 / 11pm

Hey, I’m a big fan. I was just wondering if you have plans to implement a way to sync Ubiquity commands between computers (perhaps Weave). Consistency is important with language interfaces and subscribing and/or copying commands from computer to computer is tedious. I love your work. Let me know if you are hiring any UX people.

Thanks,
Dan
Aza Raskin 12.23.08 / 1am

@Fitech: Absolutely! Weave is an amazingly strong platform to build on top of — and as syncing Ubiq commands is as simple as syncing a couple of URLs (or even bookmarks) — we’ll get that for free. Expect more on Weave soon.

We are certainly hiring. Shoot me an email with your CV (aza at mozilla).
Robert Gilliam 1.9.09 / 12pm

hi
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good luck
Mitch 1.16.09 / 5pm

i have just recently downloaded ubiquity… I think this is a great concept… I was just wondering if u could implement this feature into the desktop.

so while typing up a word document u can hit “Ctrl + space” and type in a command.

I think that ubiquity would be a lot more useful if it could be used without opening up firefox.

Say you just log onto your computer… why cant u do a ubiquity command to instantly find a map without first opening up firefox???
Philip Larsson 7.6.09 / 2am

@Mitch: I’ve heard murmurs of such a thing and I also believe that there are many people who would be excited about a desktop version. Then again I’ve also heard murmurs of “prioritizing the most fundamental”, which I am inclined to agree with. I suppose it’s a matter of not having enough coding developers on the team. Unfortunately I am handicapped in that way, I know absolutely nothing about coding, even though I would like to help.

I just hope that things work out, because Ubiquity is a wonderful project.
شات 11.27.09 / 4pm

nice.nice
John Maccormic 2.17.10 / 6am

cool. thank you

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About me...

Aza gave his first talk on user interface at age 10 and got hooked. At 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; at 19, he coauthored a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; at 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Two years later, Aza founded Songza.com, a minimalist music search engine that had over a million song plays during it's first week of operation. After Humanized was sucked into Mozilla, Aza became Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs. In another life, Aza has done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. When not working (ha!) Aza enjoys playing music and punning.

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