Google Summer of Code ideas

Hi Folks,
         Google are sponsoring Summer of Code projects again over the
(Northern Hemisphere) summer break. I've heard that some of our
developers are interested in in participating in this with
AbiWord the community.

Here are some ideas:

1. Integrate AbiWord with dashboard and beagle.

Last year I wrote the AbiDash plugins which sends clues and notifications
to the dashbaord program. Dashboard is a really interesting project which
runs in the background in a spare piece of screen real-estate. As
different programs gain focus they send "clue packets" which describe what
the user is currently doing. Dashboard integrates with the beagle search
engine and that the clues and performs searchs through the beagle index.
It attempts to find relevent files and relevent pieces of text that could
help the user with their current document.

So for example, if a user is employing AbiWord to write an essay on
Shakespear's Midsummer Night, the dashboard program would search through
the users documents looking for both relevent documents and relevent parts
of the documents to what is being typed and presents the user with useful
information without the user having to do any explicit searchs.

Both dashbaord and beagle are written in mono. This project may well make
a useful join project between the AbiWord, beagle and mono communities.

I personally hink that this is a very exciting project that will take the
desktop experience to a whole new level of productivity.

2. Help with the AbiCollab project.

There is tons of work left to do here. If someone is interested please us
know and we'll find a piece of the project that would be suitable for a
SoC project.

3. Complete the PangoGraphics class.

Lots of work left to do here. Tomas would have to be available and willing
to sponsor and supervise a potential SoC project.

4. Implement a Cairo graphcis class.

Cario is a next generation, platform independent, 2-D dimension graphics
system. Cario offers sub-pixel text positioning and a variety of other
tasty features. Implementing a cross platform solution to our graphics
class would also reduce the effort of maintaining our 3 different targets.

5. Come up with a UI suitable for the OLPC project. The OLPC project is
aimed explicitly at children and the computer screen are either 640x480 or
800x600. Our current UI is not optimum for this evironment. This project
would be to find a UI that works for OLPC.

6. Various enhancements to abiWord.

6.1 Implement "comments". This would resuse/extend our current
footnote/endnote code to embed text within a document. I could
supervise/mentor this.

6.2 Implement Repeating Table rows on different pages. I could
supervise/mentor this.

6.3 Implement "previews" of document. The idea is to display the first 1/2
or 1/3 of the first page of each document once the user selects a document
 in the file browser. I have a number of ideas on how to do this. I could
supervise/mentor this.

Of all these I'm most interested in getting "1" going.

Cheers

Martin
Received on Fri Apr 21 12:50:00 2006