14 DAY TRIAL // Canonical was making a big deal just a few years ago about the lenses and the implementation in Unity. It looks like some of the functions added back then have survived, and some of the Ubuntu developers are actually discovering them right now.
There are still some lenses present in Unity 7, but Canonical is no longer making a big deal out of them. If anything, they are not used enough, and all of the features they bring to Unity 7 are no longer advertised correctly. Since Unity 7 is more in a maintenance mode right now, the Ubuntu devs are working on the upcoming Unity 8.
As we all know, Unity 8 uses something called scopes, and it’s still not clear how those are going to be translated into the desktop experience. In any case, Unity 7 will be here for a long time, and it’s going to be supported for the foreseeable future. We might even get some upgrades for it, in time for the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS launch.
Lens-related feature in Unity 7
Canonical’s Ubuntu desktop lead, Will Cooke, posted a little tidbit of information of Google+ about this remnant option for Unity 7. From the looks of it, if you preface a mathematical operation, like addition, for example, with “calc:” the Calculator application will open with the answer, or you can see the result straight in the Dash.
From what the other developers are saying, this is a leftover from the Calculator lens. It’s not clear why it’s still there, but it works, and it’s quite useful, now that we know it exists.
It’s kind of sad that Canonical is not pushing developers to enhance Lenses for Unity, but they probably lived their lives. It would be interesting to know if there is any more of this cool stuff still available in Unity.
The last version, in theory, that ships with Unity 7 by default is Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and that should change with Ubuntu 16.10. It doesn’t mean that Unity 7 is going away, just that it won’t be the primary flavor.