GSoC 2009

[Nikolaj Hald Nielsen]

As you may have heard, GSoC is on again this year. Google will be
sponsoring about 1000 students, compared to about 1125 last year, so
it is slightly smaller this year, but not much.

Considering how big a success GSoC was for us last year, I think it is
very important that we start thinking about what kind of projects we
would like to have people working on this year. Compared to last year,
we have a big advantage in having a much more stable foundation for
students to work on, so hopefully the students will be  able to get a
lot done. Personally I can easily come up with a ton of service
related projects that I would love for people to work on, and some of
these would be really cool, but I have a feeling that there are more
fundamental features that we would gain more from having students
working on.

So, I guess my point of this email is to get people to list stuff that
Amarok 2 really _needs_ that could make for a good GSoC project.

My own first addition to this list is "Multilevel sorting in the
playlist". This might not sound like much, but to get it right, we
need it to actually work, a clever GUI for it (ideally integrated with
searching and layout selection), have all the navigators respect it
and so on. With this in place, combined with the new layouting and
search/filter stuff, I think that your playlist would be able to
stand its own against any other playlist out there, including the 1.4
one.

- Nikolaj