Gnome Extension Offers a Shopping Lens We Can Live With 72
sfcrazy writes "The year 2012 has not been very good for Canonical and Ubuntu. The end of the year saw harsh criticism of Ubuntu from bodies like EFF and FSF which accused the operating system of 'data leak,' 'privacy invasion' and adding 'spyware' features. Now, Gnome Shell is also getting online shopping lens. Alan Bell has created a Gnome Shell extension which allows a user to conduct online shopping search right from Gnome's Dash. You can install the extension from this link. Once installed you can start searching for online shopping by hitting 'super' key and then enter your search term. One of the greatest differences between the implementations is who is in control. Gnome's Shopping lens shows how it should have been done in the first place, as it puts the user in control, and not the company whose OS you are using. Bell has explained it very well on his blog."
Some problems don't need solving (Score:5, Insightful)
Putting web content in a UI element I use to start programs is simply frustrating. To make matters worse, the content is very minimal and there's no way to do anything without launching a browser.
So why is this problem being addressed in the first place? Is it just a way to make money from affiliate programs, or is there really a demand for this "feature"?
Re:Some problems don't need solving (Score:5, Insightful)
There's absolutely no demand for this kind of extension. It's just a way for developers to make a buck.
Slahvertisment? (Score:5, Insightful)
The world (and dog) seem to agree that Mark Shuttleworth screwed it up with his money-spinning exercise of searching Amazon instead of your own machine, when making an innocuous search.
Many of us started to hate Unity for that 'feature'.
And now someone comes along and offers an extension to the likewise hated Gnome3 that compounds its ugliness.
How is that newsworthy?
I sense.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I sense a problem that didn't need solving.
Any screen space taken up by this feature is an affront to every coder who's ever had to maximize their window to fit more code in the editor's view.
putting user in control? can't believe it (Score:4, Insightful)
Configurable? Gnome putting user in control? That's not their spirit. Well, probably they will improve it removing that feature in subsequent releases
Re:putting user in control? can't believe it (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a third party extension that they are hosting on their site for third party extensions. Extensions are how you extend and configure Gnome Shell.
Lens? (Score:2, Insightful)
From what I can see in the screenshots this is just a search function for a specific search domain. Just a search box and search results, looks pretty standard to me. Why do we need a new (or actually reuse an existing) term for this? A 'shopping search engine' is actually clearer than 'shopping lens'. Are we going to call Google, Bing etc. 'web lenses' now? Or does it have to be integrated in the desktop background to be called a 'lens'? Why would that matter?
I'm not opposed to jargon if it actually makes things clearer. But very often it doesn't: many new words or new meanings for existing words seem to be made up for marketing reasons, not because they are better at expressing a meaning. Using such terms adds confusion rather than value as far as I'm concerned.
We do things other than shop (Score:5, Insightful)
Very little of what I do with my PC is about shopping. If I want to do shopping I take some definite action, I don't want the default assumption that I am using my machine because I may want to buy something. I know that we are supposed to live in a consumer society, but this is stupid.