Access radios via Unity Radios lens

Unity is a place where creativity is definitely being expressed and implemented as a first class citizen, fact proven by the constant public availability of lenses, lenses embracing a massive range of "shapes", purposes and directions, from Celsius degrees for specific cities to medicines-related knowledge, presenting themselves as on-demand, just like a regular application, in the sense of being installable per user demand (thus the user not being "suffocated" by 20 lenses, when the user requirement is for 2 or 3 extra non-default lenses), and as easily uninstallable.

After landing a radio scope for Rhythmbox (useful to expose radios in the Unity Music lens, as a singular category), Ubuntu's Didier Roche has just created a dedicated Radios lens, taking the initial minimalistic approach to a larger scale, from where the user is easily comfortable to manage, search and access preferred radios.

Unity Radios lens allows users to easily access numerous online radios, by simply typing a word in the search area, action that populates the lens with radios, clicking on a displayed item, opens it via Ubuntu's default music player Rhythmbox.

The Radios lens categorizes its displayed items by Recommended, Top and Near you (properly exposed when the lens is opened, no typing required), categories that are to help the user to properly identify and access relevant radios, relevancy action helped by the available filters, Decade, Genre and Country, and the fancy card view that presents radios (if the service supports it) with good-looking thumbnails/logos and text description.

Genre adds the ability to filter the searched&found items by 130+ genres (Soul, Techno, Trance, Tango, Urban, etc), thus allowing an in-depth filtering per-user precise demands, attitude followed by Country where 90+ countries allow the user to choose only radios from a particular country (in order to use the Country filter, one must click on it, presenting itself as only on-demand, as opposed to automatically filter the displayed content by IP).

Unity Radios lens 0.1 has just landed in Ubuntu 12.10, being available via Ubuntu Software Center.