This page is an open list for ideas for the 2007 edition of Google Summer of Code. This page is now frozen, since the submission process is over.
This list is not exhaustive. It is just a collection of some ideas. To get further ideas, you can also look at our list of ideas for the year 2006
Before proceeding, please read the participation instructions. They are useful for students and developers alike.
You may want to take a look at the ideas page for 2006. Some of the ideas there are still valid today.
These ideas were contributed by our developers and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.
If there is no specific contact given you can ask questions on the general KDE development list kde-devel@kde.org. See the KDE mailing lists page for information on available mailing lists and how to subscribe.
When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:
Project Information: KPassivePopup is the class that displays information next to taskbar icons, system tray icons or windows without interrupting the user. It is used both directly and by KNotify and is part of libkdeui.
Brief explanation: Convert KPassivePopup to use QSvg for the frame etc. this would allow it to be much more flexible in its visual appearance and could allow us to eliminate the various custom implementations that are floating around. This would include examining these forks and ensuring the same functionality could be cleanly incorporated.
Expected results: The intended result would be a single implementation of KPassivePopup that could be reused without copying code by applications such as Kopete that currently maintain their own versions.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: A prequisite would be knowledge of Qt/KDE and the ability to setup a KDE build environment. Knowledge of SVG would obviously be a big help.
Mentor: Richard Moore <rich@kde.org>, Aaron Seigo <aseigo@kde.org>.
Solid is the KDE hardware abstraction layer, that enables KDE programs to get consistent results when running on different platforms.
Project Information: KJS is KDE's JavaScript engine that was originally developed for the Konqueror Web browser. It as a light-weight, standalone library that can easily be embedded into other applications to make them scriptable.
Besides being restricted to running in the sandbox of an application, usage for text and file processing or other administrative or server side tasks in a command line interpreter are thinkable. Consider what made e.g. Perl successful. What's lacking are modules providing the necessary functions.
Brief explanation: The project would start out with gathering an overview of typical functions found in other scripting languages like Perl, Python and Tcl. The most important ones would then be selected and implemented in (at first) C++ modules that are dynamically loaded by the KJS command line interpreter. An example would be the classic File object that could then be imported with an "import File;" directive by the user.
Some ideas for possible modules:
Expected results: A set of low-level modules with a documented set of constructors, functions and properties. They should form the base for pure JavaScript modules to be build on top. Where possible with reasonable effort test cases should be developed, too.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: Some C++ programming knowledge is required. Knowledge about other scripting languages like Python and Perl would be advantageous.
Mentor: Harri Porten <porten@kde.org>.
Project Information: Sonnet will be the future grammar, spell-checking and language detection framework in kde.
Brief explanation: Make kateparts compatible and integrated with Sonnet framework.
Expected results:
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: I don't know but probably C++, parsers, kate parts and language studies.
Mentor:
Project Information: Kross is a modular scripting framework that provides a complete framework to embed scripting interpreters like Python, Ruby and KDE JavaScript transparently into native applications to bridge the static and dynamic worlds together.
Brief explanation: While Kross does already provide access to Python, Ruby and KDE JavaScript, Java is missing. With a Java backend we could provide access to JDBC databases, Hibernate, Sandboxes and all the other goodies.
Expected results:
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C/C++, be able to get into the dark details of embedding Java.
Mentor: Sebastian Sauer <mail@dipe.org>
Project Information: KDEPrint is the well known and very advanced printing platform common to all KDE applications.
Brief explanation: Redesign user interfaces related to printing. Improve usability.
Expected results: Produce an improved set of graphic interfaces to KDE's printing technology, based on usability reports already available and using new (original) usability ideas.
Prerequisites: C++, KDE/Qt programming, experience with design and creation of usable UI.
Mentor: Cristian Tibirna <tibirna@kde.org>
Project Information: KDEPrint is the well known and very advanced printing platform common to all KDE applications.
Brief explanation: Port the current KDEPrint code to supporting CUPS later than 1.2, both in KDE-3.5 and KDE-4 branches.
Expected results: Based on the already very well thought out interface to CUPS-1.1, work is necessary for supporting new features and following bug fixes in the latest incarnation of CUPS, the most important backend of KDEPrint.
Prerequisites: C, C++, KDE/Qt programming, writing code following specifications.
Mentor: Cristian Tibirna <tibirna@kde.org>
Project Information: KDEPrint is the well known and very advanced printing platform common to all KDE applications.
Brief explanation: Port the KDEPrint code of KDE-4 branch to latest Qt-4/KDE-4 libraries technologies.
Expected results: This task requires a thorough analysis of technologies used by KDEPrint in the previous (KDE-3.5) incarnation and replacement as needed with new or improved equivalents from Qt-4/KDE-4. Use of the new intercommunication technologies (D-Bus) and new notification technologies is required.
Prerequisites: C, C++, KDE/Qt programming, willingness to learn D-Bus as well as KDE-4 APIs.
Mentor: Cristian Tibirna <tibirna@kde.org>
Project Information: KDEPrint is the well known and very advanced printing platform common to all KDE applications.
Brief explanation: Add support to KDEPrint for the new OpenPrinting Database which allows on-line search for new (locally unavailable) drivers for printers during printer installation.
Expected results: This task requires a good learning of the OpenPrinting Database Querying interface. Getting accustomed with KDEPrint's printer installation algorithms is also required. Target platform is KDE-4 but time permitting, a port to KDE-3.5 would be welcome.
Prerequisites: C, C++, KDE/Qt programming
Mentor: Cristian Tibirna <tibirna@kde.org>
Project Information: KIconLoader is the class the fetches icons from disk on demand and returns pixmap data for use on screen. This project would add an on-disk binary cache to be used for SVG icons.
Brief explanation: See my blog entry here for a description of the problem.
Expected results: A transparent cache that would increase the efficiency of SVG icon usage at runtime, with the possibility of adding runtime composition capabilities to KIconLoader.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: A prequisite would be the ability to setup a KDE build environment. Qt/KDE programming knowledge is not a high requirement for this task, though the student will obviously be picking some of that up as they go. Experience with similar projects involving caching would be good.
Mentor: Aaron Seigo <aseigo@kde.org>.
(Note: KIconLoader would benefit from a generic cache, not limited only to SVG but usable also for PNG icons. See the second paragraph of the benefits section in the blog entry for reasons [less disk seeking]. I think it would make sense to change this to a generic cache for KIconLoader. Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@kde.org> )
Project Information: The goal of this project would be to implement and integrate into KDE4 a Konqueror equivalent of FireFox's Greasemonkey plugin to allow installing and running user scripts. The project could start of from this existing GPL-ed code.
It seems that someone is already well on their way to completing this already: http://namshub-kde.blogspot.com/2007/01/more-work-on-konquerors-user-scripts.html
Expected results: A Greasemonkey equivalent for Konqueror that allows (de)installing and running Greasemonkey compatible user scripts.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: C++ programming skills
Brief explanation: using QGraphicsView and Qt4 for the desktop layer gives us quite a few new possibilities when it comes to desktop wallpaper images. A SoC project that results in a desktop wallpaper implementation that goes beyond the usual static display of an image would be nice.
Expected results: Efficient wallpaper support for PNG, JPEG and SVG images that supports static image effects and transition effects (e.g. when switching desktops).
Brief explanation: Ordering the icons on the desktop has always been a pain for the users. They invent a certain arrangement (images top left, devices lower right, ...) and try to stick with it. Whenever they drop something to the Desktop folder in their filemanager, or when they plug in a new device the icon appears at an arbitrary location. Using clustering techniques and meta information about the existing icons, it would be possible to determine the most useful location for a new icon on the desktop.
Expected results: Improve the icon placing strategy of kdesktop (plasma) using clustering techniques.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: Familiarity with clustering algorithms or motivation to study them, C++/Qt coding skills
Project Information: KWin is the KDE window manager, an application responsible for managing all windows.
Brief explananation: Some window managers (e.g. Ion or wmii) have the ability to divide the screen to smaller sections which make it simpler to work with several windows at the same time (window maximize only to its tile, etc.).
Expected results: Implemented tiling support in KWin.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite:
References:
Mentor: Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@kde.org>.
Project Information: KWin is the KDE window manager, an application responsible for managing all windows.
Brief explanation: Xinerama (and various implementations known also as e.g. MergedFB or TwinView) is an X server extension that merges two or more physical monitors into one large display. KDE already provides a decent support for Xinerama, but there is still room for improvement, in particular, different monitors are linked together even in cases when it might be more beneficial to have them independent, for example with virtual desktops.
Expected results: Improved Xinerama support in KDE/KWin. Specifically, making virtual desktops on different Xinerama displays independent, per KDE bugreport #107302, and related fixes/changes.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite:
References:
Mentor: Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@kde.org>.
Project Information: Strigi is a promosing alternative to other desktop search tools, like Beagle/Kerry. It has a plugin architecture that allows writing indexing plugins for a specific area, or specific enhanced purposes. Available are both inline plugins (written in C++), as well as plugins that call programs written in other languages via the command line. Strigi is showing progress towards integration to semantic desktop ideas, as in the Nepomuk project. This allows chemical information to be semantically marked up, and easily retrieved.
Brief explanation: The idea of this project is to integrate chemistry and biology knowledge into the KDE desktop, by writing chemistry and biology aware plugins for Strigi. Exact molecule searching on the hard disk will be supported via the InChI. For the rest, normal free text searching will do fine for now. Generation of InChI's will be done via OpenBabel, for files supported by the Chemical MIME's (which has existing KDE support) and kfile-chemical (which is available for KDE3 and KDE4). Optionally, the student can incorporate the chemical text mining tool OSCAR3 developed in Cambridge, UK, to extract InChI's from text documents, like PDF, HTML, etc. Here Strigi's jstream technology come in handy, as it will provide a plain text version for all those formats. Extraction of biochemical information is much easier, as these files commonly plain text already.
Expected results: Strigi plugins that:
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C++ is a requirement, as is high school education in chemistry and biology.
Mentor(s): Carsten Niehaus <cniehaus@kde.org>, Jerome Pansanel <j.pansanel@pansanel.net>, Egon Willighagen <egonw@user.sf.net>, Jos van den Oever" <jvdoever@gmail.com>
Mailing list: strigi-devel@lists.sourceforge.net
Project Information: KDM is the KDE desktop manager, an application responsible for managing X displays and user logins.
Brief explanation: Currently, the login manager and the screen locker (which also launches the screen saver) are separate applications. KDM is completely out of the loop as long as a user session is running on a particular display. This puts some limitations on the smoothness of the so-called fast user switching and does not allow for a really integrated implementation of things like pulling the authentication token (e.g., smart card) to lock the screen.
Expected results: The KDM greeter (the graphical part of KDM) should become runable from within a user session. Krunner's idle time detection needs to be merged into KDM and the possibility to launch a sub-session to start a screen saver within needs to be added. This all needs a suitable UI and a usable config dialog. In the next step, the shutdown sequence would also be completely integrated with KDM, which would require communication with KSMServer.
Knowledge Pre-Requisites: C, C++, Qt/KDE, probably some Xlib
Mentor: Oswald Buddenhagen <ossi@kde.org>.
Project Information: There are several 3D molecular editors, but only few open source programs, such as Ghemical. The GPL-ed OpenBabel project open chemistry library has expanded its usefulness improving chemistry software. This resulted in, among other things, an application and library called Avogadro. Kalzium and Avogadro will soon merge a lot of code so that both apps share an underlying rendering library for molecules (using OpenGL). Avogadro already has basic "molecule construction" capabilities. The goal of this project is to extend these such to yield a 3D editor suitable for basic molecular drawing and visualization for high school and university students.
Expected results: The improved application would be based on the new OpenGL based rendering code, and able to construct common organic molecules (such as this one). The 3D-display code inside Kalzium will be reused and expanded to handle, for example, protein "ribbon" views, surfaces, and surface-mapped functions like electronic charge. Additional features such as configurable labels (for atoms, protein residues, etc.) and flexibility to change rendering for individual atoms or bonds would be welcome.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: Basic Qt-knowledge and basic chemistry knowledge. OpenGL experience welcome.
Mentor: Carsten Niehaus (cniehaus at kde dot org)
Mailing list: kalzium at kde dot org
Project Information: Marble is a Qt 4-based generic virtual globe widget which is meant to integrate well with the KDE desktop to provide basic input and visualisation facilities for geographical data. Marble currently lives in http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/marble/ and the author would like to see Marble be included with KDE-Edu soon. More information: the Marble description.
Brief explanation: To be properly integrated with other applications a 2D View for Marble will be needed in addition to the preferred 3D View (e.g. for merging functionality of KGeography and Marble). Three steps are suggested:
Depending on the knowledge of the applicant the refactoring part can be extended.
Expected results: adding the 2D View Mode to Marble. Optionally, if enough time is available, integrate that view mode in another application like KGeography.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: basic knowledge of C++ is a pre-requirement. Basic highschool trigonometry knowledge would be helpful. Other useful skills, but not mandatory are:
Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn@kde.org>.
Mailing list: The kde-edu mailing list: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-edu&r=1&b=200702&w=2 .
Project Information: Marble is a Qt 4-based generic virtual globe widget which is meant to integrate well with the KDE desktop to provide basic input and visualisation facilities for geographical data. Marble currently lives in http://websvn.kde.org/trunk/playground/base/marble/ and the author would like to see Marble be included with KDE-Edu soon. More information: the Marble description.
Brief explanation: There are a lot of other interesting projects that would make a nice Google Summer of Code 2007 project each on their own. Keep in mind that all those should be introduced in an unobtrusive manner as Marble is aimed at casual users without much technical knowledge. So a larger part should be dedicated on the usability (Of course it needs to work, too ;-):
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: All these projects require that the student is a self-starter and will be able to do some research concerning the topics on their own. Beyond that you should have basic C++ knowledge. Prior Qt experience is a plus.
Mentor: Torsten Rahn <rahn@kde.org>, Co-Mentor for GPS support: Inge Wallin <inge@lysator.liu.se>
Mailing list: The kde-edu mailing list: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-edu&r=1&b=200702&w=2 .
Project Information: Step is interactive physical simulator for education. It is very young program recently ported to KDE4. You can find more about it here: http://edu.kde.org/step/ .
Note: This entry is added by author of the Step who want to apply to SoC as a student himself and seeking for mentor (as suggested on kdeedu mailing list).
Brief explanation: In order to be useful and to be included in kdeedu Step needs a lot more features than it currently has (it is only two month old). I propose adding the following features to Step (the list will be filtered to fit in SoC timeframe):
Mentor:
Project Information: KPilot is the KDE application which synchronizes Palm OS PDAs with various KDE applications, including KMail, KAddressbook and Calendar. KPilot makes use of the pilot-link library to handle the interaction between the device and the conduits. These conduits are plugins which handle the actual synchronization of the items. For more information see [1]
Brief explanation: The vast majority of KPilot's conduits are record-based in nature. This means that the logical program flow for each of the conduits is very much the same in that they will each:
But the current conduit framework does not abstract this common functionality into a set of base classes as it should. This has resulted in a lot of duplicated code throughout KPilot's conduit base, and each conduit has its own way of handling this common functionality. Understandably, this has led to bugs in the syncing algorithms and has made maintainability of the conduits (and KPilot) a much more difficult thing than it should be. For every conduit, the maintainer has to learn how the actual syncing is done. To make matters worse, there are a couple of conduits which don't sync correctly because of a incomplete implementation of handling records.
Expected results: The student will create an improved framework for KPilot's record-based conduits and (re)implement a (new) conduit as a proof of concept.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: basic knowledge of C++ is a pre-requirement. Other useful skills, but not mandatory are:
Mentor: Adriaan de Groot <groot@kde.org>, Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper <vR@movingparts.net>.
Mailing list: The kde-pim mailing list: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-pim&r=1&w=2.
KitchenSync is the frontend to the generic synchronization system OpenSync. It is supposed to become the standard syncing solution for KDE. Right now it already supports synchronization of KDE PIM data with a wider variety of mobile devices like phones and PDAs as well was synchronization with other applications like Evolution or Google calendar.
KitchenSync works pretty well as OpenSync, but doesn't yet cover all functionality OpenSync provides. The goal of this project would be to improve that. For example the configuration GUIs for the various OpenSync plugins would need some work.
This project requires some knowledge in KDE programming. It will also involve collaboartion with the OpenSync team, so some experience with C is helpful.
Mentor: Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>
KOrganizer Theming: In the real world calendars are made from paper and carry lots of pretty pictures, witty sayings, historical data or similar things. Compared to that calendar programs are extremely plain. One of the intents of the CalendarDecoration plugin interface for KOrganizer was to make it possible to add theming to the calendar views, so that you can add all the fun things which make paper calendars more than just a bunch of papers with dates on it. Combined with the KNewStuff technology this could bring much more color to our desktops and make KOrganizer interesting to people which currently wouldn't think of using a calendar program.
Mentor: Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>
Akonadi is the upcoming PIM Storage Service which will be used for KDE PIM 4. It's currently under development. You will find more information on the Akonadi pages on the KDE PIM Home Page. Akonadi provides a great opportunity for a lot of interesting projects. See below for some ideas.
Contact: KDE PIM Mailing List
In KDE PIM there are some XML formats which are not parsed by one of the common XML parsers, but which are parsed by specific C++ code which is automatically generated from the XML schema by a special tool, called kxml_compiler. It currently only works for basic cases. The goal of the project would be to improve kxml_compiler to work with a wider range of schemas, in particular the proposed schema which is used by the next generation of the KOrganizer holiday descriptions.
kxml_compiler is part of the Kode suite. It consists of parsers for XML Schema and Relax NG, a layer for intermediate representation of the structure of the schema and the code generator itself which makes use of a helper library for generating C++ code. Working on kxml_compiler would probably involve working on all of these components.
Expected results: An improved version of kxml_compiler which is able to generate a fully working parser for the XML descriptions of KOrganizer holiday files.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: Good knowledge of C++ and XML is mandatory, experience with Qt or XML Schema is a plus.
Mentor: Cornelius Schumacher
Project Information: Kombination is a KDE4 scrabble clone. The project would be adding an artificial intelligence interface and at least one engine. Kombination currently lives in trunk/playground/games/kombination/ and the author would like to see Kombination be included with KDE Games soon. More information: the Kombination web page.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: basic knowledge of C++ is a pre-requirement. Basic knowledge of Scrabble rules is a must too. KDE and Qt skills will be useful but not mandatory.
Mentor: Albert Astals Cid <aacid@kde.org>.
Mailing list: The kombination mailing list: http://home.gna.org/kombination/ .
Kate is a multi document editor, based on a rewritten version of the KWrite editing widget of KDE, offering all the features of that plus a bunch of its own. It is aimed to developers and other more advanced users, therefor with KDE 4, it will ship with kdesdk. The following projects are planned for Kate:
Project Information: The goal of this project is to make Kate a even better tool for software developers and a tighter integration of Kate into the development process (support for projects, SVN, ...).
Brief explanation: Make Kate a much more capable yet still lightweight development tool for KDE4. Add features to Kate including CVS and SVN integration (either via recognition of the kdesvn or kcvs utilities, or with a custom implementation), Eclipse-like workspace and project management, and build environment integration for various languages/tools via an extensible interface. Scale Kate as much as needed to accomodate these changes, and not beyond that (at least for the scope of this project).
Expected results: The intended result would be a stable and extended implementation of Kate, providing CVS and SVN integration, Eclipse-like workspace and project management, and build environment integration.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: A prequisite would be knowledge of Qt/KDE and the ability to setup a KDE build environment. Additionally, knowledge of interfacing with source code repositories via C++, and general C++ knowledge would be required.
Mentor: Christoph Cullmann <cullmann@kde.org>.
Mailing list: The Kate mailing list
Project Information: Kate for KDE 4 supports already scripting of the part via kjs, but this support should grow to be available for the application, too. Beside this, the kjs support of the part needs enhancement, too. Beside this, evaluation, if kjs or QtScript should be used for the long run is in scope of this project.
Brief explanation: Enhance and implement the JavaScript scripting of Kate part and app, evaluate the use of kjs or QtScript for the KDE 4 timeframe, define interfaces for the scripting API. A tight cooperation with the other Kate developers and coordination with the kwrite-devel mailing list is must, as the created interfaces will need to stay around over the whole KDE 4 timeframe.
Expected results: The intended result would be a set of new scripting interfaces for either kjs or QtScript for both the part and the application. They should provide a cleaned up superset of the current interfaces, allowing to write both general purpose scripts and indentation scripts.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: A prequisite would be knowledge of Qt/KDE and the ability to setup a KDE build environment. Additionally, knowledge of interfacing with source code repositories via C++, and general C++ knowledge would be required.
Mentor: Christoph Cullmann <cullmann@kde.org>.
Mailing list: The Kate mailing list
Project Information: Katepart is the KDE Advanced Text Editor component used in noumerous KDE applications with text editing needs. Katepart stores the text in a vector of lines, and searches one line at the time. Adding support for finding text spanning multiple lines, and easily replacing with text with multiple lines is one of the most wanted features in the component.
Brief Explanation: Add support for entering and finding text containing 'newlines' - according to the document settings, for entering and replacing with text containing newlines (as above), and for searching with regular expressions containing atoms matching newlines.
Expected Results: Ability to enter and find strings containing newlines both with regular expression search and normal search, and ability to replace with strings containing newlines, in the Katepart editor component.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: A prequisite would be knowledge of Qt/KDE and the ability to setup a KDE build environment. Additionally, knowledge of regular expressions, and general C++ knowledge would be required.
Mentor: Anders Lund <anders@alweb.dk>, Christoph Cullmann <cullmann@kde.org>.
Mailing list: The Kate mailing list
Important: read first! Project Information: Extend KDevelop's current snippet support to provide more powerful features, see RFE 106165 for a detailed description (this proposal has been confirmed by popular vote).
Brief explanation: Provide heavily improved snippet support as a standalone kpart module, that other KDE applications may use.
Planned features:
Development milestones:
Knowledge Pre-Requisite:
Expected results: implement the foundation and infrastructure required to facilitate development of the aforementioned features as a kpart, so that other KDE applications (besides kdevelop) may make use of snippet support.
Suggested Approach: given that the envisioned functionality would probably be interesting to a rather large user base/audience, one should consider using a library-oriented approach, where key-functionality is provided in a fashion that facilitates standalone library-deployment, so that other OSS projects (i.e. other IDE projects) may eventually employ the corresponding library to add "snippet"-support, too.
Mentor: none yet
Potential Mentors: none yet
Mailing list: KDevelop mailing list
Project Information: Ruby language and Rails web development tool is rapidly gaining popularity. The goal of this project is to implement the foundations for the best possible Ruby/Rails support in KDevelop.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: advanced knowledge of C++ is a pre-requirement. KDE and Qt skills are desired but not required. At least basic knowledge of parsing theory (lexers, LL parsers, AST's) is necessary as well. This is a challenging project.
Brief Explanation: There're beginnings of Ruby support for KDevelop4 already. So the Ruby parser would be finished first and then definition-use chain for would be implemented. Those would allow to build extended code highlighting, navigation and problem reporting. The design for Ruby code completion would also be in the scope of this project.
Expected Results:
Mentor: Alexander Dymo
Mailing list: KDevelop mailing list
Project Information: This is the project with a goals similar to the previous Ruby's one. Same are the prerequisites and expected results with only one differences. C# and Java parsers are already complete so the work could start with integrating them into KDevelop infrastructure. Also code completion for these language will be much easier to implement.
Mentor:
Mailing list: KDevelop mailing list
Fix jingle support. Actually, make jingle support work. That means port everything below libjingle to the current version of ortp, make sure it is working and make jingle support on by default. Please.
Project Information: Amarok website
Brief explanation: Amarok's motto is Rediscover your music. Since listening to music can be a somewhat uninteresting experience, we try to enhance this aspect in a number of ways:
etc, etc. I'm sure you are more than familiar with the 'omg-im-going-to-wet-myself-this-is-so-cool' experience that you have at least once experienced.
We would like to see some sort of enhancement to meta-information which can be displayed to the user. Some ideas that come to mind may include:
Expected results: The student will come up with a set of web-service enhancements and will implement them so that they integrate tightly with the final Amarok 2.0 interface and design goals.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: basic knowledge of C++ is a pre-requirement. Other useful skills, but not mandatory are:
Mentor: Seb Ruiz <me@sebruiz.net>
Mailing list: The Amarok mailing list
Brief explanation: Since the introduction of the integrated Magnatune.com music store in Amarok, there has been many proposals for other stores or services that could be integrated in a simmilar way. In the process of working towards Amarok 2.0, a new framework for adding such services without cluttering the interface has been proposed and the Magnatune store has been ported to this framework. Adding a new store or service is a nice way of getting into coding on Amarok at is fairly easy to approach witout knowing all the intricate details of Amaroks inner workings.
There are several types of services that could be of interest:
The service chosen will have to be legal, and the service must agree to the integration taking place.
There are currently no concrete agreements in place with other services, so this is very much a "bring your own idea" project, which both makes it a bit harder to get started, but also more rewarding.
Expected results: The student reaches an agreement with a music store/service/whatnot and integrates its service into Amarok. Some effort would most likely also be spent on helping to mature the service framework.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: basic knowledge of C++ is a pre-requirement. Other useful skills, but not mandatory are:
Mentor: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <nhnFreespirit@gmail.com>
Mailing list: The Amarok mailing list
Project Information: okular is a KDE 4 document viewer. http://www.okular.org
Mailing list: The okular mailing list
Explanation: okular uses the Poppler library to render the PDF files. Some files with complex patterns may take even minutes to render, while with Acrobat Reader just a couple of seconds.
Expected results: One needs to improve the Poppler library code that handles rendering of PDF files with patterns, making the pattern rendering faster with no drawbacks.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: basic knowledge of C++ is a requirement. Qt4 is strongly suggested too. Graphics and PDF konwledge are strongly suggested as well, but not mandatory.
Mentor: Albert Astals Cid <aacid@kde.org>
Explanation and Expected results: okular has a presentation mode for displaying documents on the screen in a way similar to a presentation application (think about KPresenter, OpenOffice.org Impress). Currently, the mode can just display only a single page, at the maximum size allowed by the screen. The idea is to extend the presentation mode by adding:
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C++ and Qt4 is a requirement. KDE 4, graphics and PDF konwledge are strongly suggested as well, but not mandatory.
Mentor: Albert Astals Cid <aacid@kde.org>
Explanation and Expected results: one of the okular's goals is to support the annotations, mainly coming from PDF documents (but also from DjVu and ODT documents). As the support is not yet complete, some ideas could be:
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: basic knowledge of C++ is a requirement. Qt4 is strongly suggested too. Graphics and PDF konwledge are strongly suggested as well, but not mandatory.
Mentor: Albert Astals Cid <aacid@kde.org>
Explanation and Expected results: the PDF formats allow the embedding of 3D artwork in documents. The idea is to start supporting this kind of artwork, and start displaying them on the document. What is required to do is:
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C++ is a requirement. Qt4 is strongly suggested too. Graphics and PDF konwledge are strongly suggested as well, but not mandatory.
Mentor: Albert Astals Cid <aacid@kde.org>
KBugBuster is a native KDE client for the bug tracking system Bugzilla. It allows to browse, search and view bug reports and make modifications to them. It provides features which the web interface can't provide like an offline mode.
One potential task would be to make KBugBuster work with the XML-RPC interface of Bugzilla. This would make access to Bugzilla more robust and make it possible to better support the editing of bug reports.
Mentor: Cornelius Schumacher <schumacher@kde.org>
Knoware is previous SOC project. It creates a system that collates bug reports as well as anonymous system specs offered by users. It provides a statistical way of matching up bugs to likely culprits in a system or configuration so that developers can get a better handle on what the problem likely as as well as informing users of KDE what the potential pitfalls of their current system could be.
One potential task would be to document the current system for further development. Another could be porting the curent code to Qt4.
Mentor:
There are a couple of tools available for Qt / KDE that allow testing of applications - squish and kdexecutor. Both are binary only, and are specific to the systems that they are built on.
It would be useful to have an open source tool that allowed us to test applications in a scripted way. Similar open source tools include Dogtail and LDTP, which use the accessibility interfaces in Gnome.
There are arguments for and against using accessibility - it might be a lot more useful to implement a separate system, using some of the Qt4 specific features including QMetaObject. Qt4 has a nice set of hooks, and QTestLib shows how they can be implemented. However instead of requiring specific code in the application (as done by QTestLib), it would be more flexible to use LD_PRELOAD and a small interface library.
More discussion: Brad Hards <bradh@kde.org>
Your team contributes, and wants instant, easy way to share your work-in-progress and to solicit review by peers on IRC. You either upload to your own web space or use Kicker's Personal Web Server applet, but really want to just click in one place and paste the fully qualified URL in the chat window... Hustle of establishing a collaboration mechanism should be removed from the process of contributing. When it comes to free content, even a small penalty of monotony may stifle the flow of collaboration.
We need the free artists and content contributors. Next generation of prospective free content contributor / collaborator needs something more friendly and accommodative than today's Kicker Personal Web Server.
Proposal 1
http://accentsolution.com/socproject/
by Daniel Dotsenko ( dd @ accentsolution . com )
Proposed mentors:
A. Wiedenbruch (wirr) - Active SuperKaramba maintainer and porter to Kross and KDE4 (Contacted. He indicated general interest in the project.)
R. Nickell (p0z3r) - Long-time SuperKaramba maintainer.
You can find a list of Decibel related ideas in the Decibel Wiki
Implement Ellen Reitmair's, Olaf Schmidt's, Philip Rodrigues' plan for a new infrastructure for contextual help. ideas_whatsthis_january06_v1.3.pdf
All KOffice projects have common contact information and background info; You can read documents on www.koffice.org and wiki.koffice.org, various proposals will reference pages on the wiki as thats the main design 'scratch pad' for the developers of KOffice. Contact information; IRC: irc.kde.org channel #koffice Mail: sent mail to the koffice mailinglist. Info here
See Collaboration. We don't expect a fully working implementation, as it is most probably too big a project. So please guestimate what you want to work on and finish.
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
All applications in KOffice need a grid. A grid is a raster that will be drawn on top of all content on the canvas. This will tightly be integrated with rulers and guides. Grids Framework.
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
Specifically mentioned here are KSpread, KPresenter, KChart or KFormula
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
Lib Eigen has code to do all the hard lifting for 3D calculations. But little visualisation code. Build on top of that and be able to show data in a 3D manner into a Flake shape.
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
KOffice has a generic text-tool. Which will allow KWord to show all the complexity of text needed for word processing and DTP while other KOffice apps can reuse the component as well. The text tool (based on Flake) has a plugin structure allowing external development to create extra functionality. A tutorial on how to build one will be written by the KOffice developers soon.
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
It should be a tool, like the gradient tool or the color-picking tool. (see Flake) The tool would give you a set of brushes and each brush is defined as an outline only. So you'd have a 10pt wide circle as one brush, and a heart shaped brush as another. The tool will allow the user to 'stamp' or paint using these brushes and can use the Qt4.3 binary path operations to modify the vector shape.
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
Extend the ShapeSelector to do several more things;
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
Using the Qt framework for accessibility, make it possible for the text tool and perhaps other tools to be accessible. Which means that a blind user can use KWord.
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
This maybe in combination with book-files, which combine a set of individual documents to one book with continues numbering/etc. See Usecase
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
In KOffice2.0 tables as we know it in 1.x has been removed. The tables for KOffice2 have to be based on the text engine (qt-scribe) which already knows about html-style-tables. The SoC proposal is to extend this and add tables support to KWord again using the ODF specification for the feature list that is required of tables.
Mentor: KOffice or KDE developers
Brief explanation: KWord comes with a Scripting Plugin based on Kross. The plugin provides a clean interface to offer access to the KWord functionality from within scripting backends.
Expected results: Improve the current scripting plugin.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C++/Qt, experience with word-processing
Mentor: Sebastian Sauer <mail@dipe.org>
Kexi is an integrated data management application for desktop users like Microsoft Access.
Brief explanation: Currently Kexi allows importing CSV files into an existing database, and converting MySQL/PostgreSQL/MS Access databases into Kexi databases.
The aim of this project is to provide plugin(s) that import from more database backends/formats.
You can select a backend you like to implement migration for:
For the ODBC driver, a migration plugin and a backend plugin should be provided. For Paradox, only a migration plugin is required, although this will require modifying the migration framework to allow more than one file to be selected as the source database (i.e. the database to be imported).
Both a migration plugin and a backend plugin could be provided for HSQLDB, which should be implemented using JNI to invoke JDBC methods in the HSQLDB library. To avoid Java and OO.org dependencies, a small tool could be developed in Java to export/import to/from a intermediate format, and then used from within a Kexi migration plugin.
In any case, migration plugins are simpler to implement than direct access plugins (drivers), so these can be developed first.
Expected results: HSQL support would enable OpenOffice.org Base format for KDE and KOffice itself, a good companion to already existing OpenDocument support. ODBC connectivity would add many new possibilities directly to KDE.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C++, (knowledge of Qt and experience with a given database format/backend is recommended)
More info:
Mentor: Jaroslaw Staniek <js@iidea.pl>, Sebastian Sauer <mail@dipe.org>
Mailing list: kexi-devel
Brief explanation: Web Forms allow to read-only or read-write access to database projects created with Kexi. It is optional feature for uses where client has no Kexi installed for any reason. The fact that the Web Forms will use Web standards, adds another advantage over competitors like MS Access (which uses proprietary Windows-only ActiveX bindings).
Proposed solution is to develop a small standalone web server. It is probably already written in C++ or C by FOSS community. Good examples are lighttpd - http://www.lighttpd.net/ and (being already in KDEnetwork module) KPF - http://rikkus.info/kpf.html.
The web serwer would be dynamically linked to kexidb and thus can access Kexi databases via universal KexiDB API, and create HTML content on demand as an answer to HTTP requests.
For alternative solution see "Alternative solution for Kexi forms using PHP" below.
Expected results: Shortly, it is internet-enabler for KOffice/KDE data management.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C++ and HTTP/web standards, (knowledge of Qt and experience with a given database format/backend is recommended)
More info: Solution proposed by Jacek Migdal last year
Mentor: Jaroslaw Staniek <js@iidea.pl>
Mailing list: kexi-devel
Brief explanation: Create a Kexi plugin generating PHP code saving it directy to the filesystem. This will require Apache (or other PHP-compatible web server) to be present and configured, and also will require the plugin to be packaged with a script that will install appropriate tools that allow r/w accessing the Apache/php subdirs.
Expected results: The generated code could directly access MySQL or PostgreSQL servers at the backend, so users could immediately have a robust server-side solution without complex requirements.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of PHP, web standards and C++, (knowledge of Qt is recommended)
Mentor: Jaroslaw Staniek <js@iidea.pl>
Mailing list: kexi-devel
The Qt Cryptographic Architecture (QCA) isn't strictly part of KDE, however it is used in a range of KDE applications (and other applications).
A range of projects are possible, in terms of adding security features to applications (e.g. SASL, encrypted content, client side puzzles).
A specific need is the provision of alternative backends, which are typically the interface between QCA and some underlying crypto library. We already have several, but only the OpenSSL one is fairly complete, and OpenSSL is pretty ugly. A new backend would require some previous crypto knowledge, and ability to program in C++ and C. No GUI experience required! We probably only need one good alternative on each platform.
Mentor: Brad Hards
We have a basic backend using libgcrypt, which is mostly working. However a lot of the more interesting capabilities are present in gsasl and GNUtls.
Mentor: Brad Hards
The Mozilla project has a library that is separately packaged on most systems. It offers a fairly complete alternative to OpenSSL. We have a basic skeleton for NSS, but it only offers a couple of basic crypto primatives.
Mentor: Brad Hards
On Windows, it would be very useful to use the in-built crypto libraries. We don't have a skeleton for this yet.
Mentor: Brad Hards
Brief explanation:The task of this project is to create an experimental branch of k3b that would focus on moving away from cdrtools/cdrkit applications, and use libs provided by libburnia ( libburn & libisofs) instead.
Expected results: Working & usable branch utilizing all abilities currently present in libburn and libisofs.
Knowledge Pre-Requisite: knowledge of C and C++, Qt, knowledge of cd-recording and iso generation principles is a plus
Additional info: http://libburnia.pykix.org http://www.k3b.org
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