It’s somewhat apt that Ubuntu’s ‘Lenses’ feature has brought Unity into clearer focus for many of its initial critics.
The search-orientated display windows
– called ‘Lenses’ – make finding specific files, apps or information
easy to do thanks to their tuned ‘search backends’ – called Scopes’.
Below are 10 of the best Lenses and Scopes available for Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot” and Ubuntu 12.04 “Precise Pangolin”.
Before
going any further you will need to add the following ‘Super Lens’ PPA
to your Software Sources so you can take advantage of the ‘one click
install’ buttons used in this article.
Open up a new Terminal window and enter the following command as is:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:jsevi83/unity && sudo add-apt-repository ppa:atareao/lenses && sudo apt-get update
Lastly, be aware that installed Lens and Scopes will not work until you have logged out and back in.
Graphic Design Lens.
The
Graphic Design Lens is a veritable paintbox of inspiration having been
designed to assist designers in finding resources to aid in their
creativity.
Using it is simple: enter a keyword
into the search field and the Lens will return designs and project
ideas from Dribble; swatches from ColourLovers; icons from Iconfinder
service; and GIMP brushes from DeviantArt.
The
filter pane lets you narrow searches down to specific assets, whilst
clicking on a specific result tile will download/open up the resource in
a relevant app (i.e. GIMP brush opens in GIMP).
Contacts Lens.
Since
getting an Android phone my ‘address book’ lives on Google’s servers as
part of my Google account. Amongst the various pluses this offers me is
that, rather than fire up GMail to find a contact, I can use this
‘Contacts Lens’ to search my contact details directly from my desktop.
It
doesn’t do anything revolutionary; you enter a name and the Google
Contacts Scope powering the lens searches through your contacts until it
finds a match (or matches).
Clicking on a result opens a mini contacts window so you can get the information you’re after, or edit what’s already there.
Tomboy Leans.
Tomboy
is a crutch of my creativity. I use it to jot down ideas, brainstorms,
bad puns, shopping lists, contact details, etc. With so many notes
covering so many different things it’s easy for me to loose track of
what is written and where.
It’s
this situation that the Tomboy Lens fixes. As well as displaying my
most recent notes it also lets me search through the text of all my
saved notes using the search bar. A killer feature made super easy to
get at.
If you’re an avid Tomboy user then be sure to put installing this lens on your ‘to do’ list.
Photo/Flickr Lens.
Whether I’m in need of a photo for a blog post, a new wallpaper for desktop, or interested to see what images are turned for a random tag, I turn to Flickr.
With
that in mind it won’t shock you to learn that I’m a big fan of the
Flickr Scope/Photo Lens set. It lets me search Flickr without having to
leave my desktop. The Scope does requires authorisation before it can
access photos, both your own and those publicly available, but this
minor inconvenience is well worth the convenience the lens lends to
Unity.
Unity YouTube Lens.
Not
watched enough Nyan cat? Got an urge to knock on nostalgias door and
checkout your fave cartoon as a kid? Need to see if OMG! Ubuntu! have
uploaded a new video?!
Say
hello to video-flavoured procrastination tool as all of the above tasks
are possible using the Video Lens from developers Ateraeo. It making
finding videos on YouTube stupidly easy from the desktop.
Video
results can be sorted based on rating, relevance, upload date, etc. A
configuration tool is included that lets you choose which application
videos play back in. Options include VLC, YouTube app MiniTube, or the
humble ol’ web browser.
Unity Cities Scope.
Short of a dedicated dedicated ‘weather lens’ is the ‘Cities Scope’.
Once
installed, you can enter a city and country into the Dash search bar
and have the current time, weather conditions, and link to Google Map
for the location returned in the Dash under the ‘Utilities’ heading.
Torrents Lens.
You
don’t need to be flying the Jolly Roger to make use of torrents;
there’s a loot-load of legitimate and fully legal bounty to be found out
there. From TV shows, movies and books that have entered the public
domain, to .iso’s of your favourite Linux distributions.
The
Torrent Lens and Piratebay Scope makes finding and downloading .torrent
files quicker than growling “oo-arrgh” in your best pirate accent. Just
enter a keyword and the Torrent Lens will scour The PirateBay for matching results.
Handy information on file size, type and seeder stats are displayed in the lens, and the filter pane lets you narrow things down based on category or file size.
Gwibber Lens.
Twitter.
You either get it or you don’t. And if you do then there’s a good
chance that you’re using Ubuntu’s default social client ‘Gwibber’ to
post and read updates.
The
official Gwibber Lens compliments the desktop app perfectly. It shows
messages, replies, images, etc from your stream – all of which can be
searched through and filtered. If you’re using more than one account you
can also filter messages on a per-account basis.
If
there’s a drawback to using the lens it’s that it’s slow. Often
frustratingly slow. I found it to lag a good 15 minutes behind what was
actually going on in my Twitter stream. I also dislike the fact that
clicking on a tweet/item opens it up in the browser rather than Gwibber.
But the usefulness (read: search) offered by the elegant interface more than stands on its own merits.
Spotify Scope.
There
are a slew of additional scopes – ‘search backends’ – for Ubuntu’s
Music Lens: Clementine, Grooveshark, and Banshee to name but three.
But my favourite music-lens addition is the ‘Spotify Scope’.
With a simple artist or track title search
it ransacks Spotify’s millions-strong library and gives me a bunch of
playable results (which are denoted by the Spotify logo in the bottom
right-hand corner).
Clicking on a result immediately opens the track or album in Spotify for Linux for playback. Certainly sounds good to me.
Book Lens.
As a Kindle user I download and read a lot of books – the majority of which I don’t get from Amazon’s Kindle store.
I’m
an avid fan of late Victorian/early 1900′s fiction. H.G. Wells, Olaf
Stapledon, Jules Verne, Stefan Zweig andthe majority of works by these
authors are long-since out of copyright and freely downloadable online.
The
Book Lens makes searching available to download freely (and legally)
online, as well as sifting through any local copies you have, a snap.
Enter
a title or author, narrow your search down to a specific source via the
filter pane, and click on a result you want to be taken to page where
you can download it.
Although
the Lens is capable of searching and showing locally-stored .Pdf’s
located in the Documents folder it doesn’t detect .mobi or .epub files –
a sad oversight in my opinion as .epub is the definitive and most
widely used ebook format.
source: Ubuntuland
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