The 2008 Google Summer of Code: 21 Projects I‘m Excited About

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Home »Columns »Andrew Min‘s posts
The 2008 Google Summer of Code: 21 Projects I‘m Excited About
FSM Columnist: Trusted
Andrew Min
2008-05-13
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Tags:google,summer of code
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The annual Google Summer of Code is upon usagain. For the uninformed, that’s when Google pays hundreds of studentsand hundreds of mentors to work on free software projects, ranging fromAbiSource to Zumastor. This is where great projects like the GDebiKDEinstaller were created. And this year looks even better than before,with 175 organizations and 1125 students. So today, I’m going to do ashort rundown of some of my favorites. I can’t fit them all in (let’ssave some trees!), but these are just some that stood out for me.
OS
One thing that I’ve always wished Debian-based distros to have was aGUI for Aptitude. There are plenty for Apt (Synaptic, Adept, andKPackage are just a few), but the more powerful Aptitude only has itsown terminal interface. Because of this, Obey Arthur Liu has begun workon aGTK+ GUI for Aptitude. If Obey completes it, I’m definitely using it.
Cross-platform is now officially the hottest thing for desktopenvironments. First, KDE announced that KDE 4 was being ported toWindows and OS X. Now, the lesser known Enlightenment project is doingthe same thing. Student Dzmitry Mazouka is nowporting the Ewl and Etk libraries to the Win32 platform.
The Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) is the bootloader that Ipersonally use and what most modern GNU/Linux distributions use.However, it has a slight tendency to scare the average user, because ofits black and white terminal interface. Colin David Bennett isgoing to add a GUI to the upcoming GRUB 2. The GUI will even get fancy with animated menus and such.
Gaming
All gamers have one thing in common. They love to brag about howgreat they are. Battle for Wesnoth gamers are no exception. However,right now the stats system for Wesnoth is more focused towards trackingpotential problems rather than boasting. Therefore, Mykola Konyk iscreating a new statistics system for Wesnoththat will greatly enhance the current statistics system. Improvementsinclude an additionally number of stats on the web side and some newgraphs and charts.
Graphics
I admit it: I’ve been sucked into that horrible world of Facebook. And I lovethat the Facebook photo sharing tool allows you to tag a specific areaof a photo, rather than just tagging the photo. Many others have fallenin love with this as well, including Paul Hinze. Over the summer, Paulwill be working on atool to allow Gallery2 users to have the same functionality. This could be the tool to finally convince me to switch over to Gallery2 from ZenPhoto.
GIMP is one of the most powerful image editing applications around.Because of this, it’s also one of the most complicated. For example,just looking at the menu bar gives me a headache. Apparently, it givesEvan Estola a headache too. Evan is going to be taking a page out ofApple’s book with his SoC project,Search-based Menu Browsing. Basically, you’ll be able to search the different menu items in GIMP, similar to Apple’s tool.
One of the coolest apps in Gnome is the Cheese Photobooth-clone.However, it’s missing out big on one feature: hardware acceleratedeffects. Filippo Argiolas aims to rectify this with hisExtend Cheese with OpenGL effects.These effects will include a Gstreamer backend with new effects likedistortions and color manipulation (including possibly chromakeying,which could lead to bluescreening like Photobooth boasts).
Multimedia
Most likely the most popular audio editor for GNU/Linux isAudacity. However, Audacity doesn’t support very many file formatsbesides WAV, OGG, AIFF, AU, and MP3 (and this requires LAME andlibmad). So if you want to edit a WMA or AAC, you’re out of luck.Therefore, Руслан Ижбулатов has started work onimporting and possibly exporting files into Audacity with FFmpeg,the popular audio/video decoder/encoder that supports basically anyformat. With this, you’ll be able to import and export virtually anyformat.
If you’re a Windows CE user, you’re probably pretty upset at thelack of a decent media player. Sure, there’s Windows Media Player, butit doesn’t play all of the popular formats (cough .mov cough). Therefore, Geoffroy Couprie has started work on aWindows CE port of VLC. Since VLC plays everything, this is definitely something I’ll be using if I ever switch over to Windows CE.
Another popular (and much more open) mobile platform that doesn’thave the greatest media player is the Maemo platform. Sure, there’sMPlayer, but MPlayer never worked 100% of the time for me. So I’mpretty happy that Antoine Lejeune has started work on thenew VLC interface for Maemo.
Lastly, there’s the VLC internet plugin. I love it because the VLCMozilla plugin will literally play anything, while the other two maininternet plugins (MPlayer and Xine)… don’t. However, MPlayer was alwaysmy browser plugin mainly because it had an interface and VLC didn’t.I’m therefore really excited that Vladimir Belousov has started work onGUI interfaces for the browsers plug-ins.
Network
My favorite RSS reader is Google Reader. Why? Mostly, it’s because I can read my RSS readers anywhere.I’ve started several times to use offline apps like Akregator, but thenI’d have to reread all of the news that I’d already read when I’m at adifferent computer. It was just too much of a hassle. Arnold JosephNoronha is going to remove the hassle with his projectGoogle Reader Integration with Liferea. He’s going to be adding support for syncing feed lists and “read” status.
I never got why no one integrated Google’s audio/video Jingle XMPPprotocol into their instant messenger. A few smaller apps have, but thetwo big free ones, Pidgin and Kopete, never did. What especiallyconfused me was that Pidgin’s project leader (Sean Egan) works atGoogle and is (or was) actively involved in the Jingle development.This year, both Pidgin and Kopete are getting Jingle support, thanks toMichael Ruprecht and Detlev Casanova with their respectiveYAVVA - Yet Another Voice & Video Application andJingle video and voice chat in Kopete projects. Michael and Detlev, you have no idea how happy you will make me if you complete your projects.
Pidgin’s clean interface is one of its strongest points, especiallycompared to apps like Trillian. But I’m a little upset that it can’treally be themed. Yeah, some guys at Gnome-Look figured out how to hackit, but it’s not very elegant and involves overwriting data files(never a good thing). Justin Rodriguez has therefore started work onPidgintheme improvements, which will add a theme manager for Pidgin. Yee hah!
Office
AbiWord is a great word processor, mainly because it’s solightweight. However, it lacks one big feature: OOXML (the hated, andyet popular, Microsoft Office 2007 format) export support. Firat Kiyakis trying to fix this problem with his 2008 SoC project,developing OOXML Export plugin for AbiWord,which will allow for exporting to the .docx format. While I (and mostother free software activists) dislike OOXML, it is probably going tobecome a standard and therefore is vital to have support for.
Often the most crucial part of a blog post is the image in it.However, it’s not always easy to find free images that are legallyreusable. There is one good place to find free images, though: Flickr.But it’s really a pain to use. First, you have to search for the image(using the advanced search). Then, you have to go to all sizes. Then,you have to download the image. Then, you have to upload it again. DidI hear someone say “time consuming”? Finally though, there’s hope.Husleag Mihai is planning to add support for finding free images onFlickr into OpenOffice.org with his project,Flickr Image Re-Use for OpenOffice.org. In the final version, you’ll be able to search by tag, license, and automatically insert attribution. I for one can’t wait.
One of the things that is critically lacking in Linux is speechrecognition. The technology is there: Sphinx2, by all sources, worksgreat. However, there are almost no frontends that are friendly to theaverage user (the only one even close, Perlbox, is kind of outdated.I’m sorry, it’s very outdated). Gabriel Geraldo França Marcondes isplanning on being one of the first to add speech recognitionuser-friendliness with his Gnome project,Record Speech as Tomboy Note. This one might actually convince me to switch over from KDE to Gnome. At the very least, it’ll make me switch from KNotes.
Another great speech recognition tool being worked on is Saurabh Gupta’sSpeech recognition facilityfor the Open Moko mobile platform. Using the Hidden Markov Model (HMM),Gupta will try to implement voice recognition into Open Moko. Ifsuccessful, this will seriously bump up Open Moko’s popularity in themobile world.
Other
An extremely cool KDE-based idea is thePlasma Widgets on the Screensaveridea by Chani Armitage. Simply put, there will now be an option toembed Plasma widgets (the KDE 4 widgets) into the KDE screensaver. Thatway, you can see stocks, play music, post to Pownce and Twitter, and doanything else you can think of (as long as there’s a Plasma widget forit). I’m definitely looking forward to this one, since most of thedefault KDE screensavers that come with Kubuntu are pretty bad.
While KDE 4’s compositing Compiz-like effects are extremely awesome,they lack one big effect: the magical cube. Sure, it has the handyGrid Effect,but some of us prefer sticking with the good old cube shipped withCompiz and most other virtual desktop managers. Martin Graesslin is oneof these users. He’s planning on creating adesktop cube effect for KWin. Between this and the Wobbly Windowsthat will ship with KDE 4.1, most of us will soon be able to completely move from Compiz to KDE 4’s KWin.
If you’ve ever used Wine, you’ve used it’s winecfg tool. It’s OK.It’s not as powerful as Windows’ built-in Control Panel, however. A bigreason is that many of the configuration tools in Wine are not includedin winecfg (the software uninstaller, for example). Owen Rudge is goingto fix this with his project,Implementing proper Control Panel support for Wine.
Conclusion
This year’s SoC is going to be a great summer. If even a quarter ofthese projects get finished, I’ll be one of the happiest people alive.It’s a good time to be a geek.
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Thisentry is (C) Copyright by its author, 2004-2008. Unless a differentlicense is specified in the entry‘s body, the following licenseapplies: "Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article ispermitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice ispreserved and appropriate attribution information (author, originalsite, original URL) is included".
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Andrew Min: Definition: Andrew Min(n): a non-denominational, Bible-believing, evangelical Christian.(n): a Kubuntu Linux lover(n): a hard core geek(n): a journalist for several online publications (see them all at http://www.andrewmin.com/ )
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