New features are coming to a crawl as the Ubuntu team approaches the October release date of Ubuntu 12.10, though one new feature has surprisingly reared it pretty little head.  Previews.  The idea is simple enough, but very well and attractively executed.

If you’re like me, you spend an awful lot of time in the HID, but not very much in the Dash.  Well, that might change for many people with the addition of Previews; especially for music lovers.  Previews allows users to get an up close and personal look at files by simply right clicking.  Right, it doesn’t sound amazing, but it is very well executed.  These screenshots from OMGUbuntu pretty much say it all.

Let’s say I want to listen to 6:00 from the classic Dream Theater Awake.  I no longer have to literally go the Rhythmbox to play the file.  I can do it all from the Dash, and see the other songs that are available from the album, and select them too.  Pretty cool.  My only gripe is that I still have to have Rhythmbox opened to do so, so it is not a complete replacement.  That said, I am not completely removed from the idea of replacing Rhythmbox all-together  with Unity’s Dash.

It’s not just music.  You can use it to preview anything that you have a lens for.  If you right click an application, you will get a screenshot of the application and version info.  Also, it will happily grab the application description from your apt sources.

It doesn’t go the whole 9, yet.  For instance, there should be previews of documents.  maybe a short clip of footage can be looped for a selected video file.  There is a lot of room for presentation tweaks here, but what we’ve seen so far is super-solid.

Nothing in life is perfect, but this little nuance goes to prove that the pursuit of it is not yet over.

Source | OMG Ubuntu