GSoC/2010/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
Amarok is a powerful KDE based music player for Linux and Unix, MacOS X and Windows with an intuitive interface. It makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before - and it looks good doing it!
Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #amarok on Freenode.
Project: On the Fly Transcoding
Brief explanation: Allow media to be seamlessly transcoded to another format whenever it is copied from one collection to another.
Expected results: Amaroks concept of collections allows media to be easily moved and copied around. In many cases however, the format you want in one collection is not the same as you might want it to be in when copying it to another collection. A common example is having your entire local collection in lossless FLAC, but wanting to copy songs to a mobile device that only supports mp3 (or even if the device supports open formats, you might want to transcode it to ogg to save space). On completion of this project, an option to enable transcodeing should be integrated into the "Move/Copy to collection" flow in a way that it is available whenever this is used between 2 collections. A big part of this project will be to determine the most suited library or application to use as the backend of the transcoding engine.
Knowledge Prerequisite: Knowledge of C++ and Qt is a requirement. Knowledge of media formats and the different available apps and libraries for transcoding them is a bug plus.
Mentor: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <[email protected]> or another Amarok developer.
Project: Distributed Collections
Brief explanation: Allow several instances of Amarok on a network, each with their own distinct local collection, to seamlessly search, browse music from each other.
Expected results: On completion of the project, it should be possible to allow other instances of Amarok to access your local collection, as well as have access to the collection of other instances of Amarok, if their users allow it. A protocol for searching, browsing and streaming music should be in place, either developed from scratch or based on an existing standard (if a suitable one can be found). Issues such as authentication and auto discovery must be considered and a solution found.
Knowledge Prerequisite: Knowledge of C++ and Qt is required. Knowledge of XML, JSON or other data exchange schemes will be a big benefit, As there are many open question in this project, the student is also required to be capable of independently coming up with ideas for solutions to many issues, so a high degree of creativity and independence is required.
Mentor: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <[email protected]> or another Amarok developer.
Project: Amarok & KDE UPnP integration
Brief explanation: UPnP is a network auto-discovery and services protocol that among other things allows serving media to connected devices in the local network.
By creating a UPnP KIO slave and supporting infrastructure it becomes possible to access this media directly from any KDE application. In Amarok some extra integration is needed to make the UPnP MediaServer a full Collection. This includes indexing the contents locally when the server has no, or limited support for search.
Expected results:
- A UPnP KIO slave based on an already existing or in development framework for UPnP.
- An Amarok Collection implementation including a functional QueryMaker using UPnP-search or MemoryQueryMaker.
- Optionally a PlaylistProvider implementation for UPnP-native playlists and playlist files found on the server.
Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and UPnP. KIO-slave or Amarok experience is recommended.
Mentor: Bart Cerneels
digiKam
Photo Management program
digiKam project web site - Mailinglist - IRC channel: #digikam on Freenode.
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KDE Edu
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KDE Games
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KDE libs
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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.
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KDE PIM
KDE PIM is the interest group working on applications related to personal information management, e.g. contacts, calendar, mails, etc.
One of the current challenges is utilizing the new cross-desktop PIM infrastructure called Akonadi.
There are interesting projects on all levels of the software stack: libraries, application porting, new applications, access to online resources, etc.
Website - Project Wiki - Mailing list - IRC channel: #kontact and #akonadi on Freenode.
For a list of ideas that are not yet fully spelled out, see the brainstorming list of Summer of Code ideas of the last PIM meeting.
Project: New Kontact summary based on Plasma
Brief explanation: Create a new summary for Kontact that is based on Plasma.
Expected results: The new Kontact summary should be based on Plasma and have every feature that the old summary had. The summary should look nice and have lots of bling. It should be possible to place single components of the summary on the desktop as well, as plasmoids.
Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt knowledge is needed, Plasma experience would be welcome.
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Project: Improved HTML support for KMail's composer
Brief explanation: The HTML support for KMail's composer is currently limited. This should be improved: Replying and forwarding should (optionally) preserve the HTML format. The composer should use WebKit editing so that all HTML is fully supported.
Expected results: Replying and forwarding HTML mails should be fully supported. The QTextEdit-based widget in the composer should be replaced by a WebKit-based widget, to support all HTML instead of a small subset.
Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt
Mentor: Thomas McGuire
Project: Improved theming support for the message viewer
Brief explanation: In KMail, it is currently possible to chose between different header styles, such as 'fancy' or 'brief'. These header styles currently have to be written in C++.
The goal of this project is to use the Grantlee library to provide better and easier theming support.
Expected results: The viewers of KMail, KNode and Akregator should all be ported to Grantlee. Some defaults themes should be provided, at least replacing the existing 'fancy' and 'standard' themes.
Optionally, Get Hot New Stuff should be used so that the user can easily download new themes.
Optionally, the user should have some sort of control over which header fields of the mail are displayed, see Wish 16270.
Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt
Mentor: Thomas McGuire, Stephan Kelly(?)
Project: Easy Import and Export of all PIM data in Kontact
Brief explanation: There should be an easy way to import and export all PIM data including the configuration data, to make it easy to exchange data and to move the Kontact data to another installation.
Expected results: There should be a central way in Kontact to import and export all data. Right now, some individual applications have their own ways to import and export data, and this should be unified. The new import and export tool should be able to deal with the following
- Configuration data, such as applications settings and account settings
- The actual data, such as mails, feeds, contacts and calendar entries
- Metadata, such as Nepomuk tags and annotations or Akonadi item flags
- Cached data, such as the cache of an IMAP account, to avoid re-downloading the mails
It should be possible for the user to have a fine-grained selection of the above so that the user can decide what to export or import.
Ideally, it should be possible to export all this to a single archive file which can be later re-imported.
There are several bug reports on [bugs.kde.org the KDE bugtracker] that request something like this, you might get additional ideas from them.
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KOffice
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Kopete
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KDE on Windows
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KDE on Mac OS X
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KWin
KDE's window manager
Techbase page - Mailinglist - IRC channel: #kwin on Freenode.
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Nepomuk
Website- Documentation/Howtos - Ontologies - Mailing list - IRC channel: #nepomuk-kde on Freenode.
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Okular
Okular is KDE's document viewer. It is often used for PDF documents, but can handle many other document types.
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Plasma
Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #plasma on Freenode.
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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.
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