Google Summer Of Code

Summer of Code

I’m mentoring two students this year for the google summer of code:

Daniel Siegel

Daniel is going to implement some kind of photobooth application for GNOME. There has been some buzz around the idea lately. I believe that the idea if done well could really be a mini-killer-application. There is also some integration work to be done. Two ideas were discussed in the proposal: gnome-about-me could popup the photobooth widget to take a picture of you. Same for any IM client to setup an avatar. This is just how Mac Osx does the job. Another idea would be flickr/youtube integration, the ability to directly post a photo/video to those websites from the application. More ideas discussed in the google soc proposal.

Sebastian Pölsterl

Sebastian has been contributing to deskbar already. He is also the creator of the NewStuffManager started in deskbar now growing as a standalone project gaining more and more traction. Now his task for this summer is a difficult one. Deskbar has grown organically the last year to a point where it becomes difficult to add any feature or correct the long standing bugs because of architectural problems. The issues are well known and have been discussed on IRC or the live.gnome.org wiki page. The refactoring work should land in 2.20 so we can start on a fresh basis. Ideas that are discussed include the ability to embed the deskbar entry widget in other applications like gimmie, or allow to query deskbar via dbus without using the UI. Startup times and memory usage are also priorities.

Photobooth

I promised to release the code for my photobooth-like application, which Daniel is going to use as inspiration as well. There you are:

• Photobooth-like python/glade source files.

I do not plan to maintain this piece of code, since other people will make it evolve better than me !