unity-design team mailing list archive

[Alan Bell <alanbell@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 11/11/12 23:36, Thibaut Brandscheid wrote:
> Hi
>
> I think it would be great if it was possible to set the default lens, 
> the lens that is shown when pressing SUPER, in system settings to 
> another lens.
>
> This way the Dash experience could be more personalized. Some users 
> might use the Dash mostly for file search other for application or 
> what ever search, having the possibility to set another lens as 
> default would be great. Pressing SUPER is much easier than SUPER + [key].

I think this kind of personalisation can be achieved in a different way, 
whilst also fixing the privacy issue at the same time. At the moment we 
have a single switch that sets a flag and a few of the default lenses 
look at that and avoid performing internet queries when the flag is set. 
Any third party lens written to the specification won't honor the 
privacy setting to keep searches local.
What we should have is a list of all the installed lenses, with a switch 
for each one to say whether it is allowed to see global search changed 
events. If it isn't allowed to see it then active-global-search will 
always return nothing for that lens.
This way we are not promising anything we can't deliver like preventing 
lenses from accessing the internet, however we are providing the 
facility to control which lenses see global seach queries, we are 
maintaining the ability to do shopping searches and other internet based 
searches and we are adding the ability for the user to customise the 
experience of the default lens to search for just a small number of 
common things, perhaps applications+music or files+google docs.

Alan.

--
I work at http://libertus.co.uk