Re: Google Summer of Code ideas

Hi Martin,

Those are good ideas to put up on a developers
Wiki/page. Nice little projects to get people started
on hacking Abi.

A few other suggestions:

1) Implement a C API for some of AbiWord's more
interesting internals.
1.1) Use SWIG + that C API to generate language
bindings (Python, Perl, etc.)

2) Perhaps use 1/1.1 (or a custom plugin) to integrate
Abi with DBUS. A first attempt might be to export all
of Abi's EV_EditMethods over DBUS via a plugin.

Best,
Dom

--- msevior@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>

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Received on Fri Apr 21 14:44:18 2006