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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?
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
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.