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!