Drawers 12.08.13 released with dedicated Unity lens and new features

Alignment with the desktop is a key point of developing high-quality software, suitable for numerous users accustomed to using the default Ubuntu functionalities, like lenses, polished components, etc.

Drawers is a handy application that allows one to hassle-free generate stacks/groups of items (web links, text files, images, clips, folders, music tracks, etc) via drag&drop, latter action that exposes the added items into a fancy mini Dash, related to a particular drawer/Unity launcher icon.

Drawers has been updated to version 12.08.13, continuing its road towards enhanced polished and new features.

The right-click menus have gained a fancy texture similar to the mini Dash's, definitely a + for consistency, polished approach followed by the help dialog, too.

The new 12.08.13 version introduces a dedicated lens, focused on exposing created drawers.

Unity Drawers lens categorizes its items in Items in Drawers (displays the dragged&dropped items) and Drawers (exposes the created drawers), consequently, searching&opening a drawer is to be performed by typing a drawer name in the search area and clicking on it, action that opens it.

Along with the accessing-drawers functionality, Unity Drawers lens comes with support to directly access the contained-into-the-drawers items, meaning, clicking on an image (the added items are displayed in the lens similarly to Dash home), opens it via its default file handler.

Consequently, the Drawers lens can be successfully used as a "specialized" "static" Files lens, in the sense of permanently exposing various files and folders, "updated" as one updates projects, like for instance, removing 2 items from a Preferred Images Drawers and adding 3 new images, allows the user to access the newly added 3 images regardless of periods of time, overall file usage, "immense" number of created drawers, etc.

Items can sometimes feature long names, "titles" that may "break" a visual balance in a drawer, issue fixed via Preferences-->Text length limit (in characters), thus setting the value 5, displays the items' names with only the first 5 characters followed by three dots.

Setting the value >code>0, displays the items only with thumbnails, completely removing the text from the opened drawer.

The items exposed in the opened drawers can be easily accessed by clicking on them, furthermore, especially for keyboard-based users, keyboard shortcuts are available, pressing keys from 1-9, opens the items related to the pressed number, meaning, pressing the keyboard's number 2, opens the second item from the mini Dash.

How do we install Drawers 12.08.13?
Add the following official PPA (Precise)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ian-berke/ppa-drawers

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install drawers

in order to install Unity Drawers lens 12.08

sudo apt-get install drawerlens

then restart the computer.