Rich Unity launcher quicklist proposal officially approved

Since its default implementation, Unity gathered a solid, numerous and diverse bundle of features, improvements and enhancements, etc, overall development effort landed by the developers in Ubuntu, while rooted (from a feedback point-of-view) in the powerful Ubuntu community.

With each release, Unity sees both positive reactions and suggestions, recommendations, should-bes, shouldn't-bes, etc, due to the users' serious interest in Ubuntu's default desktop interface.

As a consequence, creative third-party developers and artists constantly express mockups (related to Unity), as well as code submitted to Unity's official launchpad page.

The just-mentioned approach has been adopted by the third-party developer Lukas Vacek, who proposed a patch to the Unity launchpad webpage, essentially, proposing the addition of currently-running app tabs, dialogs, etc, into related/of-origin apps' Unity launcher quicklists (enhancements, slightly different, suggested and presented by the Ubuntu community member Alan Bell, too).

The proposed behavior can be easily observed in the below clip, where Firefox and Terminator gain enriched Unity launcher quicklists.

Hours ago, the above-presented branch has been approved by Ubuntu's John Lea and Ubuntu's Marco Trevisan, furthermore, approval that refines and enhances the initial (seen in the above clip) proposal.

Meaning, the upcoming rich quicklists are to contain entries as such (in the following order):

• application-specific quicklist options area (such as Open a New Window)
• application name (like for instance, Firefox)
• windows (window title 1, window title 2, window title 3, --Ubuntu - Mozilla Firefox, Ubuntu Forums - Mozilla Firefox, Twitter - Mozilla Firefox--)
• most recent files (file 1, file 2, file 3,--probably powered by Zeitgeist, with the option to disable it)
• Keep in Launcher
• Quit

The newly accepted functionality is to respect certain requirements, including:

• maximum width should be 300px (for quicklist entries)
• the newly proposed entries (the tabs) are to be displayed only if the app has more than 1 open window, contrary, the app shows a regular Unity launcher quicklist
• the window title is to be ellipsized at the end