Unity 7

Ubuntu developer Michael writes in his blog that his feature freeze extension request in launchpad has been approved.  Because of this feature freeze, Unity 7 will now ship as a component of 13.04.  He writes:

It’s a lot of new code, but it should all be available in a PPA in the next day or so, and it’ll be available there for about two weeks for people to test and provide feedback before it lands.  I won’t go into all of the fixes, performance work and other technical changes, but if you’re interested in what this means for you as a user, keep reading.

Michael also addresses the 100 scope promise for 13.04 and has pre-maturely announced that thay’ve fallen short, but does mention that there “will be more scopes installed on the client than in previous releases, and even more that we will be able to implement on the server-side.”  Hall also touches on the ever-present privacy concerns of Ubuntu users saying we’ve “tried to strike a balance between control and convenience, privacy and productivity”, but seems to allude to the idea that more data-sharing components of the dash will be activated by default.  So, expect controls to turn off more than just Amazon.

Privacy & Smart Scopes

Probably the most important aspect covered is smart-scopes.  The real meat of this announcement are claims that searches for applications will no longer turn up irrelevant Amazon product results.  That’s a big deal.

It also allows the scopes processes to be terminated when you close the dash, and only re-start those that are likely to produce a relevant result.  As defined by the spec, this service will learn as more people use it, providing more relevant results, so you don’t get unwanted Amazon product results when it should be obvious you’re looking for an application.  It also means fewer running processes on your local machine, and therefore less memory usage overall.

A PPA for Unity 7 will be available in the next couple of days.  You can find it in the link at the bottom of the page.

Source | Michael Hall’s Blog

Via | Phoronix

Feature Freeze Extension | Launchpad

Unity 7 PPA | Launchpad