lens

What is Ubuntu?, who is Napoleon?, what is a pony?, etc, are questions that can be answered on various online places, websites that feature a question-answers attitude.

Unity Answers lens harnesses the "artificial intelligence" of numerous websites, in order to create a Dash place where typing questions is properly met (both informative and entertaining) by answers.

Basically, typing a question in the Dash home's search area (such as What is Ubuntu?), displays (as a matched result) short yet effective definitions.

Opening an image, playing a music track, editing a text document, etc, are events exposed in the Dash, allowing users to hassle-free access previous interacted-with items.

Furthermore, the Dash contains online data, too, such as Ubuntu One Music Store albums, clips, Ubuntu Software Center-generated apps, etc, essentially, a useful bundle of functionalities and to-be-dealt-with items (the default behavior).

Unity Gwibber lens, Unity Applications lens, Unity Video lens are among the lenses provided in Ubuntu by default, lenses that help the user to manage applications, search through social contacts, discover online video clips, etc, essentially, providing a solid set of (commonly needed) functionalities used in our daily workflows.

Furthermore, taking advantage of Unity's openness and versatility, third-party developers are constantly enriching Unity with a wide, diverse and interesting development approach.

Meeting online persons, planning a discussion with a just-met business partner, creating a list of interesting gamers, etc, are situations that sometime require writing details related to a person, sometimes basic details created as a contact-like form.

Unity Contacts lens has been designed with Google contacts in mind, essentially, gathering and exposing the user's Google contacts.

RubyGems is a package manager for Ruby (the programming language), that provides a standard format for distributing Ruby programs and libraries, approach encapsulated into gems.

RubyGems has been designed with easily managing and installing gems (packaged Ruby applications or libraries) in mind.

Unity RubyGems lens gathers and exposes RubyGems into the Dash, allowing the user to search and access numerous and numerous RubyGems (software packages).

Sometimes, there are cases "demanding" a different operating system (different from the currently running OS), such as proprietary OSes, superior Ubuntu versions, etc, usually aimed at testing just-released unstable software, new features, as well as utilizing software designed for a particular OS (to-be-used for short periods of time, yet necessary).

The above aspect can be fully met by VirtualBox, a powerful virtualization-oriented application, that allows the user to run numerous operating systems inside Ubuntu.

Unity Previews are an exciting feature landed in Ubuntu 12.10 (by default), that allow the user (by right-clicking on a Dash item) to open items in a dedicated preview mode, mode exposing big-sized image, description, handy action buttons, etc, basically, presenting itself as a both informative and useful Dash mode.

Ubuntu's and third-party developers offer numerous time-related utilities, tools usually rooted in displaying the current time, date, etc, and also measuring various time intervals, latter action necessary for accurately keeping track of live shows, intervals between editing multiple documents, benchmarking a CPU (when performing various tasks), etc.

Unity panel (the top bar) displays (by default) the current time, allowing the user to instantly observe time, date, day of the week, etc.

Unity GitHub lens is a handy lens, that gathers and exposes 2,523,798 developers and 4,294,852 repositories into the Dash, basically, combining GitHub's power with Unity's versatility and ease-of-use.

Its usage is as simple as opening the lens and typing a word in the search area, action that displays matched items, clicking on a result, opens it via the default web-browser.

Google Play is a digital application distribution platform, developed and maintained by Google, allowing users to search and browse apps, books, movies, television programs, etc.

Need for Speed, Cut the Rope, Angry Birds, TerraTime, Yahoo! Messenger, etc, are among the available via Google Play software.