[Ayatana] "Unify" Dash, Places, Lenses

[Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'd love to see a justification for the current design but anyway, the
lenses and dash need to be combined into one single menu. There should
be one single search bar, one simple way to get there and one
"unified" result page. These results obviously need to be structured
better but having separate "places" icons is not the solution. There
is a variety of reasons for that.

In the current implementation the "menu" is always at the same spot
and looks the same no matter how it was invoked. One is drawn to click
always on the BFB in the upper corner which is the easiest to hit to
close and open all menus. With 3rd party lenses it's particularly bad.
I often clicked on the dash only to realize I was in the wrong menu
after a second or so when no expected results popped up.

It slows the user down and increases mental overhead. One first needs
to think which lens to click on, then search for it (only the BFB is
always at the same spot).

What if I change my mind half way in my search? I need to exit and
reenter a different view.
What if I can't remember where it was what I'm looking for? This is an
increasing problem with every additional lens you install.

It clutters the interface, takes up valuable space and above all it's
simply not necessary and the alternative is more elegant and more user
friendly.

There's one searchbar everyone already uses, no matter the experience
one has or the OS one is running: Your favorite internet search
engine. It's the most powerful and simple user interface one could
think of. It scales perfectly for every kind of user and it scales no
matter how much data you throw at it. Try to do that with a WIMP
interface. In the end the command line did win...

That level of elegance, flexibility and power is what the Unity dash
should aspire to. It could take a lot of clues from Google and Bing:
The sidebar to search by date, special commands and operators (like
inurl: or site: which could translate into filetype, tag,
metadata...), different views depending on what data one searches for
(icons for apps, thumbnails for media and text for documents), a
clever sorting and matching algorithm but most importantly a universal
search. It should be able to find anything be that content of local
docs, pdfs on the network, music by metadata in your ubuntu one cloud
or software available in the software center. From current browsers it
could take the automatically generated "most frequently used" (in the
new tab pages) and the concept of bookmarks/favorites (which are
simple to create and delete).

Some aspects are unique to Unity as an application and files menu such
as quickly browsing all apps. This should be streamlined as well. For
example one large "browse apps" button which expands a view of all
installed applications collapsible by category. For non-touch devices
this should be a huge grid but a list so everything fits on the screen
without scrolling.

Finally it needs to do all that fast, Chrome fast: get the results
before you even could finish typing...

I'll be honest with you: Right now Unity doesn't do much. It's just
compiz with a global menu and the only really new thing is the
launcher which is worse in many ways than already existing docks.
There isn't much left to do on the WM side of things, pretty boring in
fact (just fix that old remember position thing). Therefore this isn't
going to change fundamentally with "2.0". In the long run I guess
focus will shift to the applications but the one thing that needs a
lot of love and could be the main selling point for Unity is the
Dash/Lenses architecture.