In the Ubuntu 13.04 cycle the development team have been working on making a series of improvements to the dash to improve search quality as well as the breadth of areas, software, and services that the dash can search. This will result in a significantly greater number of scopes (potentially 100) shipped by default and a better search experience that is smarter in the way scopes are searched for terms, thus delivering better results and higher performance.

Some of the planning that went into this work happened after UDS, and unfortunately missed the opportunity to discuss this at the event. To get as close as possible to the normal UDS experience, a full specification for the feature] as well as the blueprint] are online and a retroactive UDS-style session happened today on a Google+ hangout that included Canonical engineers (Stuart Langridge, Roberto Alsina), community team members (Jono Bacon, Michael Hall), and community members who have taken an interest in the dash (Alan Bell, David Calle, and Christophe Sauthier who was invited, but didn’t join the hangout).

The hangout is below:

Can’t see the video? See it here

This feature should land in the Ubuntu 13.04 development branch in the next few weeks and then we will see the usual polish and refinement until we release Ubuntu 13.04 in April.

The Community Team will also be launching a project over the coming few weeks to grow the range of scopes ready for 13.04 and ease the development process. Stay tuned!