Projects/Summer of Code/2009/Ideas

Guidelines

Information for Students

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.

Being accepted as a Google Summer of Code student is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

When writing your proposal or asking for help from the general KDE community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. KDE is really big!

If there is no specific contact given you can ask questions on the general KDE development list [email protected]. See the KDE mailing lists page for information on available mailing lists and how to subscribe.

Adding a Proposal

When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:

if the application is not widely known, a description of what it does and where its code lives
a brief explanation
the expected results
pre-requisites for working on your project
if applicable, links to more information or discussions
mailing list or IRC channel for your application/library/module
your name and email address for contact (if you're willing to be a mentor)

If you are not a developer but have a good idea for a proposal, get in contact with relevant developers first.

Ideas

Amarok

A KDE music manager and player.

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #amarok on Freenode.

Project: DLNA/UPnP Support

Brief explanation: Using the UPnP protocol users can, for example, share music from their Vista computer to a PS3. Amarok lacks any sort of UPnP support. Being able to act as a client or possibly a UPnP media server would be useful. In addition to that controlling a UPnP Media Renderer from within Amarok is possible with framework support.

The Coherence server would likely be used since it is also intended to be used by a KIO slave.

Expected results:

Using the Amarok Collection framework, create a plugin which allows Amarok to browse, search and play music off of a UPnP share. Playing music may use the UPnP KIO-slave, but more advanced functionality requires Amarok to handle this directly.
Allow Amarok to share it's collection with other devices or control other devices via UPnP. This is secondary priority but it may be pretty easy with Coherence.
Control UPnP Media Renderers (DMR: Digital Media Renderer device class in DLNA) from within Amarok.

Material Prerequisite: Some UPnP devices or computers to test with. Good excuse to buy a PS3. If you live in Europe a Philips Streamium DMR can be borrowed.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt. Coherence uses Python and D-Bus but doesn't need to be hacked on in the scope of this project.

And of course, understanding of UPnP networking and devices wouldn't hurt!

Mentor: Stecchino (bart.cerneels at kde dot org)

Project: New meta-applets for the Context View

Brief Explanation: The Context View (CV) is currently used to display multiple applets that expose various information. However, due to the fact that each applet displays a certain type of information from one data source, there is significant amount of wasted space, and it is hard to show much more than 3 different pieces of data at once.

Meta-Applets are large applets that integrate date from multiple data sources in order to display more semantically related information coherently and efficiently. This could mean, for example, an applet that brings together lyrics, artist info, upcoming concerts, and related songs/artists.

More info is available here on the amarok wiki

Expected Results: Two or three (to be discussed with mentor in application writing process) applets that elegantly execute the ideas discussed above.

Knowledge prerequisite: Knowledge of C++ is required, and some familiarity with Qt is helpful (especially QGraphicsView) but not necessary.

Mentor: Leo Franchi (lfranchi AAAT kde DT org), or other Amarok developers. Contact at [email protected] or #amarok on freenode.

Project: Code regression test suite, implemented with QtScript

Brief explanation: Amarok currently has no automatic code regression testing ("unit testing") in place at all. We very much need such a system in place (for as many components as possible), as we sometimes accidentally break certain components of the program by extending the code.

Expected results: Code regression test suite for Amarok 2, implemented as one "Amarok-Script" (JavaScript), and internally split into multiple separate files and components, so that it would be possible to run arbitray tests (or the full suite) with very little effort, and no compiling, at any time. A requirement would also be testing of the collection scanning code (with test case collections), and testing of GUI correctness with the QTest library.

Also see: http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/Development/Scripting_HowTo_2.0

A plus would be the generation of suitable statistics (possibly with document export), and possibly a visual representation of the data.

Material Prerequisite: Amarok 2 trunk, KDE SVN account, git. Linux, OSX, or Windows.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt, KDE-Libs, QtScript (JavaScript), SVN, git, code testing.

Mentor: Potentially one of several. Contact the amarok mailing list or ask in our IRC channel #amarok

Project: Multilevel playlist sorting and sorting GUI

Brief explanation: In Amarok 2.1, the layout of the playlist will be very configurable, being able to show as much or as little information about each track as each user might wish. Currently however, it is lacking an advanced system for sorting in the playlist, something that many users comming from Amarok 1 are missing. While simple sorting is relatively easy to do (and has already been partly implemented) we would like to aim a bit higher with Amarok 2.

Expected results: A proxy model allowing the tracks in the playlist to be sorted using an arbitrary number of "layered" sort criteria. for instance, a sort setup could be "artist-album-tracknumber" This would sort all tracks by artist, then sort the tracks from each artist by album, and finally the tracks from each album based on track number. Once this model is working, a GUI is needed for making this functionality easilly avaialble to the user. Ideally this gui should tie in well with the playlist layout and search/filter stuff. Also, all track navigators (the classes that determines the order of playback, such as normal, random, random album and so on) need to be updated to use and work correctly with the new proxy model.

Material Prerequisite: Amarok 2 trunk, KDE SVN account, Linux, OSX, or Windows.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt, KDE-Libs, SVN/git.

Mentor: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <[email protected]> or contact the amarok mailing list or ask in our IRC channel #amarok

Project: Playlist and Collection synchronization

Brief explanation: Mediadevices and services can add tracks and playlists to Amarok. Synchronization would automatically copy over tracks between the main Amarok Collection and devices or services or even between each other, either for a single playlist or the complete collection. An algorithm needs to be implemented that does this automatically in a fast and efficient way with minimal intervention needed by the user.

Expected results: Playlists set up on both the local collection and a portable mediaplayer will get synchronized the moment the player is connected.

Material Prerequisite: Amarok 2 trunk, KDE SVN account, Linux, OSX, or Windows.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt, KDE-Libs, SVN/git.

Mentor: Bart Cerneels <bart.cerneels at kde dot org> or contact the amarok mailing list or ask in our IRC channel #amarok

Phonon

Abstraction library for sound and video support. Used by KDE notifications, Amarok, Dragon Player and Qt Software.

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #phonon on Freenode.

Project: Analyzer Support

Brief explanation: Applications such as Amarok and Dragon Player cannot have an analyzer or visualizations since they use Phonon which does not yet have the functionality to do it. The analyzer is the little bar graph thing which bounces around while music is playing. Users like it as its pretty and gives them a visual indication of their music playing.

Expected results: As this project is working on extending a library, it has three parts: the Phonon library itself, a Phonon backend, and an application. The Phonon library would need the new API calls. At least phonon-xine and preferably 1 or 2 other Phonon backends must then implement the new API. An application like Amarok or Dragon Player should be used to demonstrate the use of the new API.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt. Experience with Xine or GStreamer is probably useful.

Mentor: Ian Monroe (contact on the Amarok mailing list) or possibly another Amarok or Phonon developer.

Marble

A desktop globe and map application. Also provides a map Qt Widget.

Website - Mailing list

Project: Satellite navigation

Brief explanation: Satellite navigation devices have become widely used and the quality of openstreetmap data is becoming high, with some cities completely mapped already. Providing satellite navigation would be a useful desktop app for many as well as adding appeal for the use of KDE in embedded devices.

It also opens the possibility to bringing many of the free software ideals to interaction with the real world such as collaborative/social POIs.

Expected results: The project would aim at getting a basic satellite navigation application running. The most basic features required would be getting the current location from a GPS device and providing route calculation to a destination.

The AndNav project (http://andnav.org) has already achieved something similar for Android so it could be a point of reference for how to use OpenStreetMap data to achieve this.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt. Experience with GPS devices under linux would be beneficial. Knowing java may also be of benefit in order to study the AndNav implementation.

Mentor: I (Alan Jones, skyphyr using gmail) am willing to mentor, but not having any GPS or Marble experience there is most likely somebody far more suited to undertake this role.

Comment from a Marble Project guy: Alan, please get in touch with the Marble Project. Our mailing list is [email protected]. We'd like to support this project if a student is willing to do it.

Project: Add Time support to Marble

Brief explanation: Wouldn't it be great to be able to see the world at different times in Marble? Like having a slider which would give you the ability to browse through the time? Marble's internal datastructure is modelled after KML. But support for time-related tags is missing.

Expected results:

Having a GUI on the map and as a QWidget based dialog which allows people to "slide" through time.
Implementation of the KML <TimePrimitive> and <TimeSpan> tag: Creating the KML-handler and needed data classes for the GeoData parser.
Having a central "internal" clock which the current view would be based on.
Porting existing features (like the starry sky and the sun shading) over to the new class design.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt. Knowledge about KML is not necessary but would be appreciated.

Mentor: Torsten Rahn / Patrick Spendrin.

KDevelop

KDE-based Integrated Development Environment, specializing in c++ support, but including a powerful generic framework (definition use chain) which makes it possible to relatively easily support multiple different languages.

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #kdevelop on Freenode.

Project: C++ Refactoring Support

Brief explanation: C++ support in KDevelop is already highly advanced, often equalling or surpassing what the user and compiler understand about the code. A few refactoring tools have been developed already, but they have been constructed in a crude fashion, generating code via string concatenation.

This project would aim to create a new system to implement refactoring tools, and to create, test and deploy several advanced refactoring tools for c++.

Expected results: A library would be created to enable refactoring based on the c++ AST (abstract syntax tree). A reverse parser (AST to code) already exists, but classes would be created to allow programatic manipulation of an AST. Optionally this library would also cover a generic framework based on the duchain which would be re-usable by other languages and make refactoring plugins easier to develop and partially shareable between languages.

See the Code Generation Design documents for the initial plan for this project.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt. Experience with parsers would be a bonus.

Mentor: Hamish Rodda (Definition-Use chain code creator) rodda at kde/dot/org, possibly also David Nolden (DUChain guru)(to be confirmed)

KStars

KStars is a Desktop Planetarium for KDE. It displays a map of the sky and provides a lot of tools to learn astronomy, or to calculate and predict astronomical phenomena. See [KStars Homepage] for more information.

Project: Community Integration for KStars

Project Information: KStars is a desktop planetarium program for KDE.

Brief explanation: Amateur Astronomy (which is one of the important use-cases of KStars) is typically done in communities. KStars permits users to save their own observing logs. It would be nicer if the user could share his observing logs with other users and see other observers' logs within KStars. It would also be nice if KStars had a map (using MarbleWidget) to display various Astronomy-related establishments (like amateur associations, observatories, research institutes). Another possible idea could be an observing report generator that would generate a report based on observing logs, and at the user's will, share it / post it on the internet.

Expected results: Implement some features that will make it easier for users to collaborate, as suggested above.

Knowledge Pre-Requisite: Required: C++. Prior knowledge of KIO_HTTP will help.