Ideas

Revision 29 as of 2011-03-05 10:11:13

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Ideas for Unity Places

Unity Places are a cool new Unity technology that allow you to make mash ups of elements that integrate with the Dash and Launcher. An example of a Place is Seif's People Place:

peopleplace.png

In short, a place is something a user will access from either search or via a dedicated button on their launcher. It also provides a consistent way for users to search and browse this data.

Kinds of Places

Dash is very constrained to do text and facet searching. It's not for browsing photos, or browsing music or anything like that. Dash things are search results - a search box at the top, with search results, with headers, and search filters, and that's it. We are purposely not supporting fancy widgets or anything like that - a place is there to return data that people care about.

Application Places

Application Places integrate with your system and applications. There are currently three application places.

  • Applications - this is basically your application launcher, search for the app you want and launch
  • Files - this is a quick way to find a file via a dash search.
  • People - this is a quick way to find a person via a dash search.

For Natty these are all the application places we're working on, we'd like people to concentrate on Web Places, since the opportunity to do cool things there is greater:

Web Places

Web Places integrate your system with the web. The idea here is hit the super key, search, and then have it return results from whatever website you care about. A good analogy would be that they are like Firefox Search Providers, except they are for your entire system, not just your browser, and since they talk Zeitgeist we can manipulate that data and do cool t hings with them.

Here are some examples of ideas for some places. We need your help to come up with ideas AND to help implement them. Make sure to refer to the Unity Places Documentation if you want to write one of these and to familiarize yourself with the terminology.

  • Note, these are just ideas, think of crazy things and add them!
  • Each idea should explain what goes where in the actual Place, refer to this diagram:

unity-glossary.png

Web Places

Name

Description

Section

Groups

Launcher

Link to Project

IMDB

Search and return thumbnails of movies and TV

Genres, so Horror, Comedy, etc.

Movie or Television

IMDB Logo

Netflix

Search and return movies from your queue

Genres, so horror, comedy, etc.

At Home/In Transit/In Queue

Netflix Logo (dropping movies from the imdb place onto here should Just Work)

Amazon

Search and return stuff to buy

Categories from amazon.com like "Electronics"

Shipped/Preparation/In Wishlist

Amazon Logo - Dropping items from other searches should autowishlist

Ebay

Search and return stuff to buy

Ebay logo

Ask Ubuntu

Search and return questions from askubuntu.com

Tags

Answered/Unanswered

askubuntu.com logo

Launchpad

Search and return results from launchpad

Code, Bugs, Blueprints, Translations, Answers

?

Launchpad Logo

Youtube

Search and return videos and thumbnails

Youtube Logo

lp:~njpatel/unity-place-sample/unity-place-youtube

Wikipedia

Search and return wikipedia articles

Wikipedia Logo

Openclipart

Search and return openclipart entries

Openclipart logo

Sports Team Schedule

Quickly view/search your favorite team's schedule

All, Jan, Feb, March, etc..

Home, Away

Team Logo

Ubuntu One

Go through your Ubuntu One Stuff

Folder, Contacts, Music, Notes, Others

Today, Yesterday, This Week, Last Week, etc...

Ubuntu One Logo

Ubuntu Developer Place

Search API docs at developer.ubuntu.com

OpenERP

View product shipments, financial info etc

Month

Customer/Product

OpenERP logo

vtiger

Search and view customers, documents etc

Customer

person assigned

vtiger logo

Alfresco

Search and view documents and spaces

Space (folder hierachy)

group by document metadata items

Alfresco logo

Cloud

Search and view virtual servers click to open SSH session or vnc/SSH

Guest operating system

group by host or customer

cloud picture

Agenda

Find tasks, notes, appointments, holidays etc. from your (Google?) calendar