About Unity

Unity provides a complete, simple, touch-ready environment that integrates your applications and your workflow.

Unity is designed for designed for mouse, touchpad, and keyboard use. It includes a new panel and application launcher that makes it fast and easy to access preferred applications, such as the browser, while removing screen elements that are rarely used.

Unity Technologies

Unity itself is made up of three main components: The Launcher which appears on the left-hand side of the screen which allows you to start and switch applications, the menu panel at the top of the screen which integrates both the application menu as well as application indicators, and the Dash which provide desktop search integration for local and remote information.

Application Launcher

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The Launcher displays icons for commonly-used applications and programs that are currently running. Clicking on an icon will give the target application focus if it is already running or launch it if it is not already running. If you click the icon of an application that already has focus, Unity will activate an Expose-style view of all the open windows associated with that application.

Click here for more information about the Launcher

Indicators

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Application indicators provide a simple and effective API to provide an application icon in the notification area in the top-right part of the screen, and provide simple, accessible, and complete access to key parts of your application.

Click here for more information about Indicators

Unity comes with some common indicators that your application can integrate with.

Message Menu

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The messaging menu provides quick access to global messaging status and individual messaging applications. An application may provide a new-messages count or a time-since-last-message for multiple message sources.

Click here for more information about the Message Menu

Sound Menu

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In addition to being able to easily change audio volume, the Sound Menu lets a user control music playback from their choice of music player. It can also display the name, artist, and album art for the currently playing song.

Click here for more information about the Sound Menu

Global Menu & HUD

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[TODO: Describe the global menu]

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The HUD is a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”. This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity. Now we are bringing the same vision to the application, in a way which is completely compatible with existing applications and menus.

Click here for more information about the HUD

Dash, Lenses and Scopes

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The Dash allows the user to quickly search for information both locally (installed applications, recent files, bookmarks, etc) and remotely (Twitter, Google Docs, etc). It achieves this by having one or more Lenses that each are responsible for providing one category of search results for the Dash, and Scopes which provide the Lens with search results from multiple independent sources.

Click here for more information about the Dash, Lenses and Scopes