Labs/Ubiquity/0.2 Roadmap Proposals

The Road to Ubiquity 0.2

Ubiquity 0.2 can feature innovation in any number of areas, but we need to narrow our focus. The following sections identify potential areas that we can innovate or improve upon, with motivations for their inclusion.

Note also that the final road map doesn't dictate what won't happen: it only dictates what we're focusing on. If, for instance, we decide that we're focusing on UI innovation and you really want to work on the Herd, you're welcome to do that and we will certainly review patches for it.

Linguistics

Motivation: allowing a broader audience to use Ubiquity's current interface with ease.

• Improving the natural language parsing capabilities of Ubiquity so that it understands a wider range of inputs.

• Fully internationalizing and localizing the parser.

User Interface

Motivation: innovating the user experience to allow non-technical users to do things in humane ways that they hadn't considered before.

• Making Ubiquity's UI "pluggable", so that different Firefox extensions or command scripts can easily access its functionality; this can help allow developers and/or designers to innovate the UI in new directions, e.g. by:

• adding pie menus,
• integrating with the Awesomebar,
• providing access for blind users,
• building a unique interface for a website.

• Making Ubiquity's UI not only pluggable but streamable too, allowing new usability features to be streamed in rather than manually updated.

Community

Motivation: exploring social mechanisms of trust, communication and collaboration that may augment their technical counterparts.

• Adding a social trust network to the Herd.
• Adding comments with user voting to command feeds.
• Adding collaborative code review/annotation capabilities to command feeds.
• Adding wiki-like functionality to the herd and/or ubiquity.mozilla.com.
• Creating a "featured command feeds" page/site similar to addons.mozilla.org.
• Creating a planet-like aggregator for Ubiquity-related content on the web.
• Adding a well-documented public API to the Herd, allowing anyone to create applications and other web content that draws from its information.

Thunderbird

Motivation: exploring Ubiquity's philosophy in an entirely different, and perhaps even more useful context than the web.

Desktop Integration

Motivation: "breaking the walls" and bringing the web outside of the browser allows for truly seamless, ubiquitous access to the web's functionality.

• Allowing Ubiquity to be used by third-party desktop-wide graphical CLIs such as Quicksilver and Enso via inter-process mechanisms like JSBridge.

Firefox 3.2 Integration

Motivation: getting Ubiquity functionality into FF 3.2 will allow the rest of the world to experience some subset of Ubiquity-like functionality now.

Stabilization of Current Feature Set

Motivation: ... without some core stability I think the user base will lose interest and we'll be left with an interesting toy for a handful of people, but no wide-spread adoption. —Gary Hodgson

• Improving performance
• Restoring functionality lost in 0.1.2
• Exploring and implementing technical security mechanisms such as sandboxing
• Making debugging easier
• Getting Ubiquity to the point that it's secure and stable enough to be featured on AMO