An idea how to handle scopes and lenses properly.

[Didier Roche]

Le 11/10/2011 20:52, Jo-Erlend Schinstad a écrit :
> After I raised some concerns about the music lense, I got some 
> feedback that made me think. Didier Roche asked me how we can make it 
> better.
>
> I had the TV on in the background the other day and there was a 
> documentary on. The narrator kept referring to "the damn wall". I 
> thought it was rather peculiar language for a Discovery documentary, 
> so I had to investigate. It turned out that it was about the 
> "Dambusters" who blew up a nazi dam during the second world war. If 
> you get a single crack in the dam wall, then that wall is coming down. 
> The same can be said about trust. If the emotional trust is broken, 
> then a relationship might be lost even if there's still some rational 
> trust. A user might be calmed by the fact that only searches for music 
> is sent online, but I'm a little bit worried that some might not be 
> able to shake the question: "yes, but how do I know?". The feeling 
> that the crack might expand just doesn't make you want to invest in 
> it. I wrote to Didier that a bottle is either water-proof or leaking. 
> That's not entirely true, of course. A bottle is supposed to leak, but 
> only when and how you want it to.
>
> So how do we make the lenses and scopes work the way we want it to, 
> without making it complicated and without introducing any privacy 
> concerns? For the music lense in isolation, this would be very easy. A 
> checkbox "search online" or "use u1ms" would suffice. But we want lots 
> of lenses and scopes, don't we? So what happens when I get a Google 
> Docs scope? Should it be told about all my file searches? In some 
> cases, maybe that'd be fine. In others, it would be completely 
> unacceptable.
>
> What if we learn from JACK? They manage many inputs and many outputs. 
> Sounds perfect for lenses and scopes. That is, we'd have our lenses on 
> the left and our scopes to the right. Then we could just connect our 
> lenses to the scopes we wanted to use and disconnect them just as 
> easily. The default scope would always be personal data and nothing 
> else, but it would be easy to add others. You'd want to use the u1ms 
> scope, of course, but wouldn't it be nice if you could also have a 
> music scope for your local radio channel so that you could choose to 
> purchase the last song they played? And wouldn't it be nice if a sales 
> manager could connect to the recent customers scope of the salesmen in 
> her team so she could easily find a customer if anyone had a question? 
> Obviously, when you installed a new scope, it would be able to add 
> itself -- with your permission.
>
> I'm sure there are thousands of use cases, but that also means we must 
> have a flexible way of managing them. Until we do, I propose that the 
> online searches for the music lense be deactivated for Oneiric and use 
> the time to come up with a proper way to deal with this issue and to 
> make it both more flexible and user friendly. Searching u1ms through 
> the music lense, is not a killer feature (though it is nice), but does 
> have a potential to fuel some FUD and I don't think it's worth it. 
> Better to really _launch_ it in April.
>

Hey again Jo-Erlend,

Yeah, managing scope and having sensible defaults in something we should 
discuss on, especially with book lens that the community has done and 
I'm sure there are plenty of them. I still think that "showing cover 
album" (and so, downloading the corresponding cover to what you are 
listening to) that we had for quite some releases in banshee is "worse" 
than sending a simple search you made in the music lens (search through 
the global home dash doesn't get data from it). No identification 
personal data are sent in both case anyway.

As a followup to the personal reply you made to me and that I answered, 
I'm pretty sure that it's quite late for Oneiric (but I'll still poke 
around) and those things should be discuss lenghty, with some  design 
guys and keyholders. I think dealing that at UDS will be the right place 
to gather all relevant people. Would you lead this session, even 
remotely? We can make sure it's on track and discussed without any taboo 
to have a way to enable/disable all those online features.

Cheers,
Didier