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Gnome Extension Offers a Shopping Lens We Can Live With
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."
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"?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Gnome Shell's shopping lens can be intuitively accessed by anyone! Just press your windows key three times quickly and then Ctrl-S, then shuffle through the windows until you find the lens interface! Click it and a whizzy animation will move the input box to a random monitor. Enter your first letter! A whizzy animation will confirm your letter's input and close the window. Repeat the process for the second letter of your search term until it is complete! Congratulations, you just netted yourself a bargain!
where opening a browser to shop the entire world from our toilet is just too much?
If you want Amazon search to be "seemless" (a word which I wouldn't think even belongs for a tack on UI element like this), you just remove the "a" prefix. There could be a better UI to this concept; the important advance is that there's a UI to limit it at all, while still being useful.
If you don't like the intermediary, it's stated to be "about 5 lines of code" to build your own. The only interesting part is that it needs an Amazon services ID to unlock the search API of their site. If you have your own Amazon services capable account instead, you can host it. If you don't, this guy is offering the connector to make things easier for you, specifically disclaimed with how he'll benefit from that.
A bit evil out of the box, accurately described as being so, and with easy workarounds to the biggest concerns. That solves this problem as well as I'd like to be. As for what we know about the service hosting so far, it's the personal site of someone who works at a Canonical partner. It looks to me like he's trying to get someone else to pick up the intermediary role by providing an example.
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 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.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Configurable? Gnome putting user in control? That's not their spirit. Well, probably they will improve it removing that feature in subsequent releases
Hi, I am Alan and I wrote it. I am not trying to get anyone else to pick up the intermediary role, I kind of like the idea of the floods of money pouring into my Amazon account, however I wanted to point out that other people have got the software freedom to fork the front end and run their own back end and do that. For the record, the back end uses the Amazon API PHP library and has boilerplate code to set it up, including the super sekrit API keys that I can't include in an open source client then after the boilerplate there are basically two lines of active code: :)
$response = $amazonEcs->category($type)->responseGroup('Medium')->search($searchquery);
echo json_encode($response->Items);
so it just spits out the "Items" array from the JSON it gets from Amazon as JSON.
It isn't a personal site as such, it is one of our company servers running at Hetzner in Germany. I am a joint owner of the company so you could say it is mine
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.
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.
ah, fair point. I guess I was expecting people to be able to connect the dots a bit better. I will add the relevant info to the root page of the web service. It was an afterthought putting anything there other than a 404 error to be honest. Libertus Solutions is my company and if you take the products bit off the front of the URL you get to the contact details and so on. I just flung up the web service to make the client work. The back end is trivial, it reads the query string, uses boilerplate code to set up the amazon web services connection, gets a datastructure from Amazon and spits the results part of that structure straight out again. The only reason it isn't published is that it includes the non-shareable API keys, I might split those out into a separate file so I can publish it. If I could have done without the intermediary and got the client to hit Amazon directly I would have done, but that would require everyone who wanted to use it to register as an Amazon API developer (giving up *lots* of privacy). /var/log/apache2/access.log because I haven't bothered to turn that off yet. I fully intend to do so because I don't want the log data because someone might legally demand it if I have it and I don't want to have to pay to defend my refusal to hand it over. I would rather not have it. I might get the back end to update some counters so I have some kind of daily load indicator but I certainly don't want to know what people are searching for.
At the moment it is doing the default logging of requests to
I will get a report from Amazon about what products I have earned commission on if people purchase through my affiliate ID. If you change the affiliate ID to some other value then someone else will get those reports so do bear that in mind. If you remove the affiliate ID then I will insert mine on the server side, (or Amazon get the commission and they are more evil than me so it is for your own good) but if you really want to give nobody the commission (or give it to Amazon) then put garbage in the affiliate ID and the only evil organisation that will know what you are up to is Amazon itself.
it is the key that wears it's underpants on the outside.
Those underpants have got a Windows logo on them for reasons of unspeakable evil.