Managing Scopes on Ubuntu for Phones is getting a whole heap easier thanks to a new ‘bottom edge’ gesture introduced in recent development builds.
“Scopes” form the basis of the Ubuntu “home screen” experience, and offer up curated, data-specific content based around a theme, service or website.
The Amazon Scope, for example, lets you search for products, browse by category and view product details without having to open the site in a new webpage, while the one from The Weather Channel offers up forecast information for a location, parts of which can be tapped or swiped through to reveal more detailed reports.
Some Scopes are based around a theme and integrate several data sources, such as the music and video scopes, and virtually all that are available can be ‘favourited’ and added to the roster so that the data and services you’re interested in are never more than a swipe or two away.
As awesome as having all these info pools is, when you’ve pinned a lot of them it can be a slog to get to the one you want.
In recent development builds of Ubuntu (for phones and tablets) a new gesture has been added to make jumping to a screen easier. Rather than swiping your way through you need only pull up from the bottom of the screen and tap on the tile of the screen you want.
Szymon Waliczek shared a video of the feature in action on Google+ and it looks great:
But the features aren’t stopping at simply listing your favourited smart screens; developers will add more features to the bottom edge gesture, including the ability to reorder and remove Scopes, in forthcoming builds.