One of the best feature of the Unity desktop in Ubuntu is the lens. Lens are the search feature in the Dash. Different lenses allow you to perform search functions, for example, the Music Lens allows you to search for music that you have recently listened to while the Applications Lens searches for all your applications in the system. In Ubuntu Oneiric, it comes with three default lenses, namely the Applications lens, Recent Files/Folders lens and the Music lens. Below are several useful lens that you can add on to your system.
Note: The lenses listed below are for Ubuntu Oneiric only. There are several other lenses that are available for Natty only and I purposely left them out of the list. Most of the lenses below will work with Natty too, but some of them have different packages name, so the installation method might not work.
1. Ask Ubuntu
Are you an active user of AskUbuntu? Or that you have plenty of questions about Ubuntu and is always looking to AskUbuntu for answer? Good news for you, the AskUbuntu lens allows you to search the AskUbuntu site right in your desktop (Dash).
Installation:
Log out and log in again.
2. Bookmarks lens
Bookmarks Lens allows you to search your web bookmarks directly from the desktop.
Installation
Log out and log in again.
3. Gwibber lens
If you have connected your various Twitter, Facebook and identi.ca accounts, you can now search your tweets, status update or message directly from Dash. There are also ways for you to filter results to show only messages, replies, link, images, videos etc.
Click here to install, or in the terminal, type:
4. Google Books Lens
For those books lovers, you can now use the Google Books lens to look for ebooks in Google Books.
5. Gdocs Unity Lens
Do you always use Google Docs to manage your documents? You can now use the Google Docs lens to search your documents from the desktop.
Next, open up the unity-gdocs-lens.py file and scroll down to line 124.
Replace GDOC_USERNAME with your Google username and GDOC_PASSWORD with your Google password. Save and close the file.
Lastly, run Unity Gdocs lens:
Sources: WebUpd8
6. Web Sources Place
Note: The PPA has stated that it is working with Oneiric, but I have not been able to get it to install.
Conclusion
The lens feature was introduced in Ubuntu Natty and has only become more mature in Oneiric. As of now, the number of lens for Ubuntu Oneiric is still very limited. Hopefully, more developers will come out with more useful and handy lenses for the platform. As for the lenses mentioned above, you don’t have to install all of them. Just grab the ones that you need will do.
What other lenses do you use in your Oneiric?
Damien Oh started writing tech articles since 2007 and has over 10 years of experience in the tech industry. He is proficient in Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, and worked as a part time WordPress Developer. He is currently the owner and Editor-in-Chief of Make Tech Easier.
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