New In Ubuntu Linux 13.04!

The alpha release of Ubuntu Linux 13.04 `Raring Ringtail`. The company has shared few important insights into the latest version that is in work. Cristian Parrino, Canonical\’s vice president of online services elaborated on three important features through a post on the official blog.

According to the blog post, the company has a number of exciting improvements planned for 13.04 that will make the Dash more comprehensive, more online and as a result – slicker and even more useful. Check out the three most novel changes in the next release:

Smart Scopes – Scopes are the daemons capable of presenting local or remote information right in the Dash. In 13.04, Canonical will increase the number of scopes installed by default in Ubuntu (including many existing community developed scopes) and introduce the ability to automatically light up the right ones based on their relevancy to a user’s search query. For example, a search for “The Beatles” is likely to trigger the Music and Video scopes, showing results that will contain local and online sources – with the online sources querying your personal cloud as well as other free and commercial sources like YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, etc. To achieve this, the Dash will call a new smart scope service, which will return ranked online search results, which the Dash will then balance against local results to return the most relevant information to the user. Scopes are becoming a really interesting contribution area for the developer community.

Instant Purchasing – With this new version, users will be able to purchase music or apps directly from the Dash, without opening a browser or a separate client. In 13.04, Canonical expects to enable instant payments, powered by Ubuntu One, for both applications from the Software Center and music from the Music Store – to deliver the fastest possible purchasing experience directly from the Dash.

More Suggestions and User Controls – The More Suggestions scope, which currently returns relevant commercial content available from the Ubuntu One Music Store and Amazon, will expand to include more retailers. Canonical is also testing a few additional user controls like filters for local and global searching. In the meantime, users can already focus a search to local files only with a simple super-f keystroke.