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It’s often hard to remember Ubiquity’s presence and keystroke without a visual reminder—even I often forget that I could use Ubiquity and end up going to a search engine or using the search bar for some quick lookup task. What if the Ubiquity input were in the toolbar and always visible? How would that affect people’s use of Ubiquity? And what could we make that look like and how would it behave? Today we’re kicking off the Ubiquity Persistence Project, a new Ubiquity initiative to explore what a persistent Ubiquity might look like in the Firefox toolbar.

In order to facilitate this discussion, we created the Persistence tool. With the Persistence tool you can quickly try out new design and interaction ideas, mocking things up with some simple jQuery-powered JavaScript and CSS and see your changes live. The Persistence tool is bundled with our latest Ubiquity beta (install link).

The Ubiquity Persistence Project: exploring a persistent Ubiquity in the toolbar from mitcho on Vimeo.

I just put together a screencast introducing the initiative, demoing the Persistence tool, as well as talking about this project’s relation to the ongoing work on Taskfox. We’ll look forward to your comments and designs!

Yesterday we released Ubiquity 0.5, a major update to the already popular Ubiquity platform. Among numerous other features, Ubiquity 0.5 includes the first fruit of months of research on building a multilingual parser and natural language interface. In this blog post I’ll give a quick overview of new internationalization-related features in Ubiquity 0.5 as well as a quick roadmap of future considerations.

Of course, one of the best ways to learn about the new features is to experience them… try Ubiquity 0.5 now!

Install now!

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As many of you know, earlier this week we released a preview of version 0.5 (0.5pre). We’re going to stress test and refine this release through the weekend and push the official 0.5 out next Tuesday. This release will have fully localized commands for Danish and Japanese, as well as parser settings for a number of other languages. Read this Labs blog post to learn more about the 0.5 release and how to test it.

It’s not too late to add localizations for other languages to 0.5, though. Localizations help make Ubiquity more “natural” for more users, offering a new level of ease and familiarity to the already powerful Ubiquity. We have a new tutorial to help you localize commands.

To help encourage command localization, we now have gettext-style po template files for all the bundled command feeds in the hg repository. You can find these files in the ubiquity/localization/templates directory of the repository, or on our online hg repository.

If you complete some localizations (even incomplete) for your language and would like to submit them into the repository, for the time being, you can post them on this trac ticket.¹

I’ll be looking forward to seeing your localizations! If you have any questions, feel free to ask on the ubiquity-i18n Google group or on irc.mozilla.org#ubiquity. ^^