Labs is working on a new release of Ubiquity, tentatively scheduled for mid-June. It’s a fairly major update with a lot of changes and new features; major enough to deserve to be called Ubiquity 0.5.

The main goals for Ubiquity 0.5 are as follows:

1. Make Ubiquity easier to learn with better organized documentation and help content, and a new interactive tutorial that walks users from zero to basic competence in a few minutes.
2. Internationalize Ubiquity with a new parser that can handle the grammars of many languages. We’re aiming to release Ubiquity 0.5 with at least three usable languages; more are in development. This is thanks to the hard work of our extremely dedicated Ubiquity internationalization community.
3. Implement a more flexible way of handling input that will allow for more consistency, and no more hyphens, in command names. (more about the proposed change here.)
4. Begin doing usability research on Ubiquity as part of the new Test Pilot program.
5. As always, fix bugs and improve built-in commands.

In order to complete all of these goals, we’ll need the help of everyone in the Ubiquity community. And I don’t just mean developers — command authors and regular Ubiquity users are just as important! There is a lot you can do to help make this release a success, even if you are not a programmer and don’t know the first thing about Javascript.

If you’ve been thinking about getting involved in Ubiquity development, either by writing code or in one of the many other ways you can contribute, now would be a great time! Below are some ways that you can get started.

If you write code…

• Learn how to develop for Ubiquity.
• Find an open bug ticket to work on.
• Help us review these patches.

If you don’t write code…

• Help us improve the documentation of the built-in commands. No programming needed — just edit a wiki page!
• Help us improve the contents of the new interactive tutorial. This one is a wiki page too.
• Help us reproduce one of these bugs. All you need is a willingness to try out different versions of Ubiquity or different versions of Firefox and report back on what you find.
• Add your voice to the main Ubiquity discussion group where new features and major changes are proposed and discussed.

— Jono DiCarlo, on behalf of the Ubiquity development team