Friday, July 6, 2012

Unity-Lens-News updated to incorporate local news

When the Unity News Lens was released earlier this year, it took an excuse out of not keeping up with current events.


Coming today, the lens has now been updated to grab local news as well.
Some of the new features are:
  • Local News and Top Stories displayed by default
  • Filter ‘topics’, such as ‘Entertainment’ and ‘Sci/Tech’
  • Browse news based on your system language or location
What powers the lens is Google News. The developer has stated that more sources will be added over time.

How to install/upgrade on Ubuntu
The Unity News Lens is not available in the Ubuntu Software Center yet, so you have to install it via the scopes packagers PPA.

So if you want to install, copy and paste these lines into the Terminal.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:scopes-packagers/ppa
That code was to add the PPA. Then add these lines to update your repos and install:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install unity-lens-news


If the news lens is already installed, you should be able to update the lens via the update manager. If you can't, then try entering this command:
sudo apt-get upgrade unity-lens-news
Let me know of your thoughts below in the comments...