Hi Everyone, my name is Olli Ries (olli on IRC) and I am a Director of Technology at Canonical, responsible for most of the Canonical client upstream projects such as Unity and web apps. In addition to a long overdue introduction of myself I also wanted to share some updates for 12.10 that my teams have been working on.
A few new features are appearing in Ubuntu 12.10 that relate to searching offline and online content and in some cases, generating affiliate revenue to helps us to support the Ubuntu project. Let me share some further details about this work and invite you to give us feedback. Firstly, we have been building improvements around searching and previewing content directly from the dash (you will have seen the dash previews already in Quantal). A new feature we have introduced extends what was already introduced in the Music and Video Lenses, with a “more suggestions” results category that is added to searches performed from the home dash. This helps users find content available online in addition to what already resides on their device (thus continuing the maturation of the dash as a viewer to different types of offline and online content). As with the other lenses, a preview section, accessible by right clicking on the result, will allow users to instantly view descriptions, app ratings, music previews, purchasing options when relevant and more, directly from the dash. For some of this content, if a user clicks the item and purchases it, it will generate affiliate revenue that we can invest back into the project (in a similar way to how we generate revenue from the Firefox search bar). We have found affiliate revenue to be a good method of helping us to continue to invest in maturing and growing Ubuntu. Another addition is that we will be including Launcher web apps icons to Amazon and the Ubuntu One Music Store by default. We feel that these icons will provide convenient access to these resources for our users and also benefit the project with the generation of affiliate revenue in those cases that these resources are used. If our users choose to not use these Launcher icons, they can be easily removed by the user by dragging the icon to the trash. These are features we have been working on throughout this cycle, and we apologize that it was added after Feature Freeze. Unfortunately, we had a few complications that occurred in the development of these features (such as some staffing adjustments and scope adjustment) and some technical issues we needed to resolve before we felt it was ready for inclusion. We appreciate that it is suboptimal that it is landing late, but we are confident it will be an interesting and useful feature for our 12.10 users. We have been sure to take care of the necessary documentation to get these features included after Feature Freeze. We also appreciate that these features have not had as much testing as we would like, but we are coordinating with Nicholas Skaggs on the Community Team to get additional manual testing and we are continuing to building extensive automated tests for the feature (like we do for the others features our team delivers). Naturally, if you have any further questions, please let me know. I am looking forward to working closer with you. Thanks, Olli -- ubuntu-devel mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel
