GSoC/2014/Ideas

See also: GSoc Instructions, Last year 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

Note

Follow the template of other proposals!

Project:

Brief explanation:

Expected results:

Knowledge Prerequisite:

Mentor:

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

Your Own Idea

Project: Something that you're totally excited about

Brief explanation: Do you have an awesome idea you want to work on with KDE but that is not among the ideas below? That's cool. We love that! But please do us a favor: Get in touch with a mentor early on and make sure your project is realistic and within the scope of KDE. That will spare you and us a lot of frustration.

Expected results: Something you and KDE loves

Knowledge Prerequisite: Probably C++ and Qt but depends on your project

Mentor: Try to see who in KDE is interested in what you want to work on and approach them. If you are unsure you can always ask in #kde-soc on Freenode IRC.

digiKam

digiKam is an advanced digital photo management application for Linux, Windows, and Mac-OSX.

• digiKam project web site
• Mailinglist
• Google+ page
• #digikam IRC channel on Freenode

Marble

Marble is a virtual globe and world atlas — your swiss army knife for maps. Find your way and explore the world!

• Marble project website
• Mailinglist
• Google+ page
• #marble IRC channel on Freenode

Interactive Tours

Brief explanation: A Tour is a set of related places along with supporting media (text, images, audio, video). Tours can be viewed (playback): The invididual places are visited in a defined timeline. They're useful for a wide range of tasks, like showing an interesting hike along with panorama pictures, highlighting places of interest for sightseeing or showing historic events and political changes happening over decades. The Marble library has been designed to support these use cases, but the user interface does not reveal all the features yet. This project is about changing that.

Expected results:

• Extend the existing Tour widget for animated tour playback
• Improve the usability of the Tour widget
• Support interactive elements in tour playback
• Implement time support for tours for different time ranges (from eras to years to days to minutes to milliseconds)
• Add support for recording tours
• Enhance the screencast feature to generate videos from tours.

Optional:

• Extend Marble's owncloud synchronization feature for uploading tours to owncloud
• Add tour viewing support to the Marble owncloud app
• Implement tour viewing in the QML version of Marble
• Provide tours for existing map themes to highlight features of them

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt. Would-be applicants are expected to work on junior jobs (possibly related to the project). Try to find your way into http://marble.kde.org/dashboard.php#contributors and solve as many tasks and bugfixes as possible.

Mentor: Dennis Nienhüser and other Marble developers.

KDE Edu

Sound Visualization and Sound Effects in Artikulate

Brief explanation: Artikulate is a language learning application that focus on improving a learner's pronunciation skills by repeating native speaker recordings, recording that try and comparing boths. By repeating these trials, a learner can continuously improve his/her language skills. There are areas for this project:

1. native speaker recordings are recorded (either by GStreamer or QtMultimedia), converted to an OGG file and saved. What is missing is an application of noise cleanup filters, removing of no-sound intervals, and normalization (possibly combined with a very basic sound editor)
2. when playing and comparing sounds, there is no visual feedback about how much the soundwaves differ: plotting the soundwaves in a reasonable format

Goals: The goal is to extend the sound processing in Artikulate to

1. Implement simple sound filters for normalization, noise removal, removal of white noise and integrate sound postprocessing into the editor workflow
2. Implement plotter for soundwaves and integrate this in the training mode

Yet for both it is important to research which libraries already exist and possibly could be reused. Also, research is needed about which techniques for comparing the soundwaves is appropriate. A proposal should already contain verbose information about these questions.

Knowledge Prerequisite: a must is knowledge of C++ and Qt, a plus is knowledge of sound processing libraries (e.g. GStreamer) or experience in sound processing

Mentor: Andreas Cord-Landwehr and/or other people from KDE Edu

KStars

KStars is a very powerful tool for anyone interested in astronomy. It is part of the KDE Edu suite.

Kexi

Kexi is a visual database creator. It can be used for designing database applications, inserting and editing data, performing queries, and processing data.

More info: Developers' wiki, web site for users, mailing list, IRC channel: #kexi and #calligra on Freenode.

Calligra Plugins

Calligra is an office suite with lots of different applications with an user interface that is easy to use, highly customizable and extensible.

More info: web site for users, mailing list, IRC channel: #calligra on Freenode.

Project: Variable thickness lines

Brief explanation: One of the most fundamental basics of drawing is varying the width of your lines to show shape, form and perspective. Almost every line tapers at either end, and often gets thicker and thinner in different places as needed. For purely technical and histrorical reasons though, every vector program (Illustrator, Inkscape, Karbon etc) make curves all one hard width. This proposal is to create a variable width path shape / tool, much like the path tool, would allow drawing curves, but where each node could have its width set so that the line width changed smoothly from node to node. As a plugin for the Calligra suite, this would clearly benefit apps as Karbon and also Krita.

Expected results: variable width path tool is able to change the width of any path node to an arbitary percentage (say 155%) of the stroke width. See http://bugsfiles.kde.org/attachment.cgi?id=56995 for mockup. The shape needs to be able to save and load in svg/odf.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt, SVG?

Mentor: Thorsten Zachmann < zachmann @ kde dot org >

KDE Games

About KDE games: http://games.kde.org/

Trojitá

Trojitá is a fast IMAP e-mail client. Since late 2012, it is a part of KDE's extragear. The project focuses on delivering a usable, fast, standards-compliant, cross-platform and reliable e-mail client which can scale from cell phones to huge e-mail archives without annoying slowdowns.

Solid

Solid is the KDE sub-community of everything related to Hardware support.

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

Simon

Simon is a speech recognition suite.

Blog - Mailing list - IRC channel: #kde-accessibility on Freenode.

Keyboard Layouts

Keyboard layouts in KDE allow user to use multiple keyboard layouts and switch between them. It consists of keyboard configuration module (in System Settings), keyboard layout widget/applet, and keyboard layout daemon.

Project: Integrating IM with keyboard layout configraiton

Brief explanation: Input method and keyboard layout configuration are serving the same purpose - to allow users to type text in non-default language. Currently KDE has integrated system to configure keyboard layouts but IM need to be configured somewhere else. Also when IM is configured it takes over some functions of keyboard layout configuration. So it would be nice if we could have IM and keyboard layout configuration in one place.

Expected results: Keyboard configuration module in System settings will include IM configuration and it will be integrated with existing keyboard layout options.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, Qt, understanding of Input Methods

Mentor: Andriy Rysin <[email protected]>

KDE PIM

The KDE PIM community work on a set of libraries and applications for Personal Information Management, including email, calendaring, contacts, and feed aggregation.

OpenHolidays

Brief explanation: The KHolidays library provides KDE applications with information on public holidays around the world, however the file format is very hard to use and maintain and the library features are very limited and restricted to Qt users. The goal of the OpenHolidays project is to develop a new open standard and data repository that can be used by any project that needs the data. See http://community.kde.org/KDE_PIM/KHolidays for more details.

Expected results: Define the new JSON file format and port the existing data files to the new format. Develop a shared Qt-only library to parse the holiday files and provide access to them with a iCal style event-based api. Implement an Akonadi resource to access the data. Extended goals: Develop a JavaScript library to use the files. Develop a web site and web service at openholidays.org to provide online access to the data files.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt for core goals, JavaScript and web services for extended goals.

Mentor: John Layt and other KDE PIM community members.