Users can now easily access time, weather and map information for almost any location in the world by adding a new ‘Scope’ to Ubuntu’s Unity desktop.
The ‘Unity Cities Scope’ grabs various data from online services to provide the time and current weather conditions, along with a link to the location on Google Maps, for any location entered into the Unity Dash searchbar.
Appending the country name after the city allows results to be narrowed down: –
Installing the Cities Scope in Ubuntu 11.10
As with David Callé’s ‘Calculator Scope‘ we wrote about last week, the Cities scope is part of the ‘100 Scopes project’. It is available to install from the ‘Scopes Packagers’ PPA.
- sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
- sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install unity-scope-cities
Bugs
Any bugs you encounter whilst using the scope should be filed @bugs.launchpad.net/onehundredscopes with the term ‘[cities]’ written at the start of the bug report title.
However, the following bugs are known and should not be filed: –
- Some city names in some languages are not recognised
- The clock icon is not time accurate
- The temperature is only in Celsius degrees
Let us know how you get on using it in the comments below. Feel free to share your feature ideas for this or other scopes and lenses, too.