GSoC thoughts and questions

[Daniel Winter]

Hello everybody,

well as I already said in #amarok.dev, I am thinking of doing an Google Summer 
of Code project for Amarok. 

Ok first a few words about me (i think some of you may already know me (at 
least have seen my name on irc)). I am a 26 years old computer science 
student from Dortmund/Germany. 

The problem is, i am not really sure what to do as the project. I read yor 
proposals on techbase.kde.org.  

Nepomuk Storage, masstagging or even the CD-Stack thing sound  interesting. 
But all of them have their cons. So i want to hear what you think. And also i 
would like to hear which of the three things is your favorite.

1. Nepomuk Storage:

I am really excited about the things Nepomuk will hopefully do for KDE and its 
applications sometime in the far future. 

And i hope to see labels back in Amarok 2 soon.  

BUT: Nepomuk, SPARQL and RDF are completely new to me. (ok well, I read the 
short Nepomuk dev introduction a few weeks ago). 

I am afraid  that that is over the scope of the GSoC if done right because of 
the lot of learning and getting into the new technologies. Maybe i am wrong 
here. 

Also If i am correct, the KDE-Nepomuk guys are working on an simpler 
convenience API to Nepomuk for common uses in KDE programs. So maybe it is 
better to wait for them? I am not sure if that would even be complex enough 
for the needs of Amarok. 

For this project i will first go in contact with the nepomuk devs.


2. Mass Tagging:

Mass Tagging is nice but here it is critical to find a really good solution 
for the GUI of it. Just take the easytag look and copy it will not work well 
(and also i think Amarok should not copy other software) in Amarok. 

I would go for it and try to find a good solution for the gui. But here i 
would like to find out if i can make up with something that I and you (the 
Amarok devs and Users) would like before i even write the proposal. So a lot 
of talking and thinking about it before would be needed here. 

The problem: The deadline for the proposal is quite soon. 

If you say we would like to see your proposal on this, well than you would see 
me in IRC the next days and i will come up with a few ideas about it the next 
days and will post them here to get your comments on it. 

If you already have a few ideas for the gui I would be happy to hear them.

3. CD-Cover-Stack/Tower view for Collection Browser

This was in discution on amarok at kde.org the last days. I think i have now 
understood the cd-stack idea. 

But to be honest: I am not an artist at all. So at least I would need some 
help by an artist to make a few nice graphics (I know that there are not a 
lot graphics needed, but the few should be done nice).  Also i have never 
done any 3D programming before, but i think it could be fun to learn it. But 
eventually   it would be better if someone with good knowlege would go for it 
altough the 3D things here would be quite basic. 


Generally: I know C++  and some Qt4 (not that much, played around with it a 
little and read the book from Daniel Molkentin about it). Qt4 seems to be 
really well designed and easy to understand.

Ok, so know i would like to here your thoughts and meanings. For what would 
you like to see me write a proposal?  

And sorry for my quite poor english. If i really write a proposal it would be 
nice if some native speaker could help me to make the spelling and grammar 
acceptable.


Regards,

DanielW