Kinda, I suppose, although am not convinced by that analogy (Netflix allows browsing, etc). But I sorta see what you’re aiming at. I think I’m starting to conceive of scopes as “lightweight apps”, which people have said before, but I think that the mistake that’s been made is that people hear that as being “they have a lightweight UI” or “they are lightweight in terms of file size”, which are techie things that nobody real cares about. What scopes are, I think, is lightweight in attention – they’re easy to browse through and expose stuff you care about without a lot of cognitive load required to get it. (Google Now is similar, here, I reckon.)
Here is an article about Scopes: http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2015/01/ubuntu-phone-bq-photo-scopes-details
Order of the stick doesn’t as far as I can tell. If you are into tabletop roll playing it’s an amazing comic. If it does have an official one, I haven’t found it. Not that I’d use it anyways, can’t remember the last time I actually looked for an rss feed.
This comparison is interesting because you picked one of the few things that are actually an aggregated system already. If I understand this correctly, and I’m not sure I do, aggregated scopes are kind of a RSS for everything.
I have a folder that’s called Social on my phone, and it has apps for Telegram, Twitter, SMS and so forth. I have another folder called Sound that has apps for podcasting, mp3s. And another for video (Netflix, HBO Nordic +++) and one for Files (Dropbox, Box.com, local files +++)
Since the underlying data is thematically the same, these could be 4 scopes: messages, sound, video and files - and thereby reducing my 16-20 apps to 4 scopes.
But I don’t see the benefit of single service scopes yet.
See how many things are wrong in this http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31148661
I’ve counted a few.
I am also not very convinced.
On my Android device I have two screens one for Google Now and second for my apps. Google Now is suppose to provide me with all the aggregated content in an immediate fashion in a single screen.
If Scopes are pre-made screens then that would mean all my content is segregated and there is a good chance that I will never visit a lot of screens/scopes.
Where does Scopes get its data from? Is it processed on the device and unique for each individual user?
Would using Scopes mean I will have to paint myself brown? If Scopes are Ubuntu only then I will have to use everything Ubuntu which I clearly don’t and wouldn’t. Are Scopes available for KDE, Android, iOS, and Web?
Data mining is a hard problem. Google with its army of computer science and mathematics PhDs and tonnes of data have clearly not mastered it. When I moved from US to India, YouTube, Play Store, etc. they all started showing me regional Indian content. I was quite perplexed with the choice Google made for me there. I highly doubt other folks could process data better than Google.
While Dilbert has an RSS feed, it’s a “we updated, come take a look” one, as is Girls With Slingshots, Evil Inc, and a few others. In my RSS reader, I separate comics with picture feeds, and comics with picture links. Oh, and NSFW ones, so I don’t get in trouble for looking at them at work 
Mine’s due in a couple of weeks.
I’ll do a review after I have a go.
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Stoked.
Like Intents on Android (and iOS8) ?
Er, no, not really. Intents are like a universal sending mechanism, where scopes are like a universal collection mechanism.
More like the difference between a twitter client and an rss reader, but for everything.
I think.
Or perhaps a better way to explain it… Intents say “I want to do this thing, who can do it for me” scopes say “I’ll render anything you send me in this format”.
Agreed with @JonTheNiceGuy here. Intents are about “I want to do a thing: give me a list of everyone who can do it, and allow apps to add themselves to that list”. Scopes are “take data from this source or sources that’s relevant to who I am, where I am, and what I want, and show it to me”. The Dash, filled with scopes, is much more like making Google Now your home screen.
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Sooo, I have kinda noobish question, how secure are scopes to use?
I mean, I could make “Trust me I won’t steal all of your bitcoin” scope… or something like that. Or, considering that “scope can pull in stuff from any other scope, because that’s exactly what scopes are designed for” I could take your credit card info, or mail password,… all from my “most handsome supersexycool weather scope”
Scopes can either access local data or the internet, not both, and like apps on the Ubuntu phone they are sandboxed so they can only access local data that they’re allowed to, not everything.
@sil Is it possible to put the whole of the ‘mobile’ wikipedia dump onto an Ubuntu phone, then ?
As I find some of their projects for Libre - Manuals quite interesting and I have helped with.
It certainly should be possible, @TheGuyWhoLovesChill. In the old days it was possible to get a ZSomethingOrOther database for Palm IIIx devices which was the whole of Wikipedia. I’ll have a look around for conveniently compressed DB dumps 
(update: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TomeRaider_database was the Palm thing!)
(update update: it is possible, indeed. But a full wikipedia dump is pretty large, even compressed. It would be perfectly possible to write an app which read these compressed dumps, and indeed someone did a few years ago for desktops (http://owi.sourceforge.net) and there’s also http://offline-wiki.googlecode.com/git/app.html which is a web app whihc caches it all and works offline.)
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Ha! I’m not writing an app to do it. I don’t need an offline wikipedia. It’d be possible to build one, though; perhaps you may want to float the idea in some Ubuntu-specific forums and see if anyone fancies the challenge?