Allow enabling/disabling Unity scopes from Privacy Settings

Bug #1198554 reported by Jeremy Bícha
36
This bug affects 6 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Activity Log Manager
Confirmed
Low
Manish Sinha (मनीष सिन्हा)
unity-lens-applications
New
Undecided
Unassigned
activity-log-manager (Ubuntu)
Triaged
Wishlist
Unassigned

Bug Description

The "include online search results" toggle in Privacy Settings is only a partial solution to the customizability people want from Unity's online searches.

Unity 7.1, as part of the 100 Scopes initiative, adds many more scopes and allows for scopes to be individually disabled without installing them. The UI/UX for this is pretty bad though.
1. Open the Dash
2. Switch to the Applications lens
3. Click Filter Results
4. Select Search plugins
5. Select the scope you want to disable and click Disable

A better way for discoverability and usability is to have the Privacy Settings' Search tab include the list of installed scopes with an on/off toggle switch next to them.

The list of scopes can be found by recurisvely searching XDG_DATA_DIRS/unity/scopes/*.scope. If a scope is in a subdirectory, replace the / with a hyphen (for instance graphics/colourlovers.scope should be graphics-colourlovers.scope).

A .scope is a modified .desktop so display the Name and Icon listed. If an icon isn't listed, you can fall back to displaying /usr/share/icons/unity-icon-theme/places/svg/service-generic.svg .

To disable a scope, add its name to gsettings com.canonical.Unity.Lenses disabled-scopes.

Optionally, you can extend the basic enabling/disabling interface to allow choosing which scopes should always be searched and which should show up by default in the Home lens.

Also optionally, remove the Search plugins feature from unity-lens-applications.

See also the final mockup on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SecurityAndPrivacySettings for a proposed Ubuntu mobile version of this.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: activity-log-manager 0.9.6-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.10.0-2.9-generic 3.10.0
Uname: Linux 3.10.0-2-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.10.2-0ubuntu3
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jul 6 18:04:49 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-06-14 (22 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu-GNOME 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Alpha amd64 (20130613)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: activity-log-manager
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)
description: updated
Revision history for this message
Manish Sinha (मनीष सिन्हा) (manishsinha) wrote :

Let's this out in next release

Changed in activity-log-manager:
assignee: nobody → Manish Sinha (मनीष सिन्हा) (manishsinha)
importance: Undecided → Low
milestone: none → 0.9.7
status: New → Confirmed
Changed in activity-log-manager:
milestone: 0.9.7 → 0.9.8
Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in activity-log-manager (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Manish Sinha (मनीष सिन्हा) (manishsinha) wrote :

Unity 7.1 landed in Saucy 18 hours back.
https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/saucy/+source/unity/7.1.0+13.10.20130729-0ubuntu1

Now I can start working on it.

Revision history for this message
Jeremy Bícha (jbicha) wrote :

Oh I didn't realize you were waiting for that. "Unity 7.1" meaning the 100 scopes feature has been in Saucy for a while but the versioning was confusing.

Revision history for this message
Manish Sinha (मनीष सिन्हा) (manishsinha) wrote :

As of r84, I have managed to get the list of all the scopes under XDG_DATA_DIRS/unity/scopes

There are a few confusion.

e.g. I have /usr/share/unity/scopes/graphics.scope which does not have an icon because it is a category scope for /usr/share/unity/scopes/graphics/deviantart.scope and this latter one has an icon. What should be done? Should I ignore the category scope and only go by lead scopes instead of scope which serve to act as a container for other scopes?

Revision history for this message
Alfred E. Neumayer (beidl) wrote :

Why not use the path from the scopes 'CategoryIcon' property instead?

Changed in activity-log-manager (Ubuntu):
status: Confirmed → Triaged
importance: Undecided → Wishlist
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