Unity Tomboy Lens has been updated to work with the latest Unity available in Ubuntu 13.04. Also, the lens now supports Dash previews so you can quickly take a look at your note contents by right clicking the note in Dash.

Gwibber, the microblogging client available by default in Ubuntu, has been rewritten in QML recently and is now called Friends App. 

Also, Gwibber Service (the backend) and the Gwibber Unity Lens have been replaced with "Friends Service" and Unity Friends Lens and the new packages have landed in the Ubuntu 13.04 Raring Ringtail repositories for a while, but they didn't work properly, at least for me, until a couple of days ago.

Gwibber used to be installed by default in Ubuntu, however, the new Friends App isn't (though the Friends Lens is installed by default) available by default in Raring and I'm not sure if it will make it, but you can easily install it via Ubuntu Software Center. Below you'll find instructions for installing the new Friends App in Ubuntu 12.10 or 13.04.

The Unity Movie Lens can be used to search for Movies and using the Previews feature (which can be accessed by right clicking on a search result) available in Ubuntu 12.10, you can see various movie information like the movie cover, rating, genre, artists and a movie description.

A while back, Lorenzo has created an alternative video lens and YouTube scope for Unity, which can be used to easily search and play YouTube videos using an external player of your choice.

Lorenzo's YouTube lens/scope has been updated for Ubuntu 12.10 recently, getting proper video previews (I say "proper" because the default Ubuntu 12.10 video lens previews are kind of broken) which display the license, view count, likes and dislikes, the video description along with a video image and options to play the video using the player selected from the YouTube scope settings or open it in a web browser - check it out:

Unity 6.8.0 has been released in the Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal repositories today, along with updated default lenses, bringing many bug fixes as usual, along with an option to disable online results from showing up in Dash.

Starting with the latest Unity 6.8.0, you can disable Dash online search results by going to System Settings > Privacy > Search results, and setting "When searching in Dash - Include online search results" to OFF:

Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal beta 2 has been made available for download today.

There are quite a few changes in Ubuntu 12.10 beta 2, including a new Unity version which brings some more polish and tweaks along with 3 new Unity lenses, Amazon and Ubuntu One Music store webapps installed by default, a new default wallpaper, but also some LightDM and Messaging Menu changes. Read on to find out more!

Everpad, an application that integrates the popular note taking service `Evernote` with Unity through an AppIndicator and Unity lens, was updated recently, the new version bringing a cool new feature for Ubuntu 12.10 users: support for Unity Previews, being one of the first unofficial lenses which takes advantage of this new feature.

Evernote is a note taking service in which the notes can be text, images, voice memos, handwritten notes or file attachments. There are Evernote clients available for Windows, Mac OSX, Android, iOS and WebOS, but there's no official Linux client.

On Linux, you can use NixNote (previously Nevernote), an unofficial Evernote client written in Java but if you want something lightweight, you should try Everpad, a new Evernote client that integrates nicely with Unity.

Ubuntu doesn't have a built-in settings GUI to disable Unity lenses and the only way to remove a lens from Dash is to uninstall it. If you only want to temporarily disable some Unity lenses, you can use an application called Lens Toggle.

Recoll is a full text search desktop tool which indexes the contents of many file formats including OpenOffice, MS Office, PostScript, MP3 and other audio files, JPEG and more. Besides regular searches, Recoll also lets you perform some advanced operations like searching for the author, file size, file format as well as operators like "AND" or "OR".

Unity Recoll Lens lets you use Recoll from Dash, without having to open any additional GUI. The lens comes with a few filters like Text, Spreadsheet, Presentation, Media or Message, but for more advanced searches, you'll have to manually enter the Recoll search query. Examples:

The Unity Files Lens currently relies on Zeitgeist to display search results, meaning it can't find files you've never interacted with / accessed. But an improved Unity Files Lens is currently in testing, which doesn't rely solely on Zeitgeist. Finally!

Lorenzo @ Atareao.es has created an Unity video lens and a YouTube scope for it, which lets you easily search and even play YouTube videos in either an external player (and thus, without using Adobe Flash) or your web browser.

The default Unity Applications Lens displays frequently used applications as well as applications available for download along with the installed applications list, and this may seem too cluttered for some. So here are two alternatives to the Unity Applications Lens: Unity Bliss Lens and RunLens.

David Callé has released a Grooveshark scrope for the Unity Music lens which lets you search for music on Grooveshark from Dash. The new scope uses the free Grooveshark API and clicking on a search result opens a new tab in your default browser, playing the selected song.