As part of the recent announcement that a smarter Scopes API is to debut in Ubuntu 13.04 came word that as many as 100 new data sources could ship by default.
Why so many? Ubuntu hope that providing more sources for queries to be searched against you’ll be able to find more of what you want without leaving the Dash.
Ubuntu wants to be more helpful and more relevant than it is at present – as well as faster.
Toggle On/Off
Unlike Ubuntu 12.10, these Scopes won’t continually be running in the background. They will only be ‘triggered’ if they’re going to provide ‘relevant’ results to whatever it is you’re searching for.
If you’re online then this judgement is made by an intelligent ‘Smart Scope Service’, which learns what is relevant based on users behaviour.
Ubuntu call it ‘crowdsourcing relevancy’. I’m just going to call it the beginning of Skynet.
Chances are not everyone will need all 100 scopes, so Raring will, developers say, make it easy to toggle off those you don’t need.
But what Scopes might we see shipped in Ubuntu 13.04? What sort of results can we expect to see filling up the Dash for certain queries?
100 Scopes – A Work in Progress
Before we see what we might be able to search, let’s take a moment to doff our digital caps to both Mark Tully & David Callé. This pair of prolific developers are responsible for the majority of Lenses and Scopes already available on Ubuntu, as well as those listed beneath.
This list is still growing so don’t take it as exhaustive just yet. By the same token, some Scopes listed may (for one reason or another) not ship as default.
Caveats aside, here’s a look at some of the services we can expect to search with the tap of the Super key later this year…
Online Music Sources
- Soundcloud
- Grooveshark
- Radios
- Ubuntu One Music
Music Players
- Audacious*
- Clementine*
- Guayadeque*
- gMusicBrowser*
- Musique*
- Rhythmbox*
News, Weather & Information
- Clear Dark Sky
- Google News
- Weather Underground
- OpenWeatherMap
- Wikipedia
- Europeana
- Recipe Puppy
- Gourmet*
- Songsterr
- Yahoo Stock
- IMDb
- TMDb
- Gallica
- Wordnik
- Songkick
Art & Design
- Dribbble
- ColorLovers
- DeviantArt
- OpenClipArt
Shopping
- eBay
- Etsy
- Amazon
Social
- Foursquare
- Yelp (the hey-cool-places-near-you-foursquare-sucks-by-the-way website)
Developer
- AskUbuntu
- Devhelp
- GitHub
- launchpad
- PHP Doc
- PyPi modules*
- Manpages
- Texdoc
- Yelp
- StackExchange
- SSH search
Utilities/Local
- Files
- Applications
- Calculator
- Chromium* bookmarks
- Firefox* bookmarks
- Virtualbox Machines
- Zeitgeist Web History
- Google Drive
- is.gd
Items marked * depend on an application to work.
What sites and services would you like to see added? Have you been working on a scope of your own? Share all in the comments…