Make Dash home screen an external lens
| Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Unity |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
| libunity |
Confirmed
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned | ||
Bug Description
There's lots of talk on the ayatana list about the Dash home screen being useless. Personally I never use it, nor have I seen anyone use it. In order to enable people to help us figure out alternative solutions I think it would be great to have the home screen be a good ol' out-of-process lens like the apps and files. This would allow people to experiment with new "home lenses".
What we'd need in order to pull this off:
* Manage the global search across all lenses in this external home lens
* Expose a renderer in libunity+unity with the required looks (do we need 2 rendering modes?)
Or the alternative:
* Keep the home screen as it is, but allow a lens to "override" it by owning some special name on DBus
Allowing to override (or quick pin) which lens the dash defaults to when it opens is very important not only to individuals, but to business or institutions.
hmm, am not totally sure this is a full duplicate of bug #885738 ...
I think the idea here is that you would be able to "override" the old home lens and use another as primary, be it the music-lens, movie-lens, file-lens (for institutions?), the new dash multi-view or even use the stripped down "search-bar-lens" that Mark mentioned...