As UDS continues over in Florida, USA thoughts have turned on how to make integration between applications and the Unity desktop better.
Quicklist plans
The dearth of quick-lists for many of Ubuntu’s default applications, such as Nautilus and Ubuntu One, will be addressed this cycle.
These include: –
- ‘Ubuntu Button’ quicklist to house lenses
- Nautilus quicklist qith links to documents/videos/photos etc folders
- Ubuntu One
- Transmission
- Each application within LibreOffice should have a quicklist
Indicator Applets and notification area
Few changes were mooted with regards to Ubuntu’s set of Indicator Applets, although a separate Messaging Menu session to be held later in the week could bring more focused discussion on this area. One interesting note: it was said that the Ubuntu One team are working on their Indicator Applet.
Discussion was brought up around disabling the ability to ‘whitelist all’ non-indicator applet-using applications and utilities from.It was argued that, as 2 years have passed since the notification area was depreciated, applications available via the Software Centre that don’t support indicator-applets should have bugs filed against them.
Launcher integration
Further to additional quick-list support as discussed above, plans for further Launcher Integration for a variety of command-line applications and graphical applications were talked about. These include launcher support for Shotwell photo importing, the Ubuntu Software Centre and ‘wget’.
Scopes and Lenses
Proposals and plans for Scopes and Lenses in Ubuntu 12.04 will be explored later this week, but one feature that will, tentatively, be included in 12.04 is the ability to add Lenses to the Launcher.
Lenses could also be installable from the Ubuntu Software Centre as developers continue to take advantage of the various APIs available.
Icons that don’t suck
There are many applications within the Ubuntu archive who have icons ripped from the annuls of computing past. Put simply: they suck. Various approaches to addressing apps with poor and small icons were proposed, to be investigated over the coming months.
The most feasible of which will be introducing some kind of icon ‘over-ride’ to forcibly replace bad icons.
Misc
Privacy concerns were raised regarding various lenses and results displayed within them. Some kind of switch to ‘turn off’ software recommendations or search-term blacklisting was mooted, and would be of particular use to corporate/business users.