Ideas for Student Projects

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Am Freitag, 9. Februar 2007 schrieb Scott Wheeler:
> On Wed, 7 Feb 2007 01:52:26 +0100, Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:
> > Furthermore, the prof used Linux on his desktop, but not KDE, because
> > GNOME looked way more polished and gave him the impression that Gnome was
> > years ahead of KDE.
>
> ...but then complained that it was a little hard to use after switching
> away from using OLWM on his SPARC when IT took it away last month.
> "Netscape has changed a lot," he noted.  ;-)  (Or in other words,
> unless CS professors have changed drastically in the last few years,
> they're hardly incidators of current trends in desktop usage.)

Actually, he is not one of the old-school CS profs (I once sent a 
S/MIME-signed mail to such an old-school CS prof, and the response I got was 
that the doesn't read emails that only contain attachments.... Quite 
embarrassing for him.) 
The guy I talked to was a young associate prof, who switched to Mac from Linux 
on the desktop, and uses Linux on his servers. He's also an open source 
developer for Cocoon, btw.
I would actually say, he is quite representative for the stuff that CS is 
heading to.

And I have to admit, that I fully agree with him. KDE might be absolutely 
top-notch as far as technology is concerned, but the UI (in particular the 
config dialogs) don't look clean and easy at all. Rather, they simply offer 
hundreds of options to the user, most of which he'll not need anyway, and 
those that are needed are often hard to find.

Now, I'm not saying we should go the GNOME road and simply through out most of 
the options. I'd rather see things really cleaned up and rearranged in a way 
that our plethora of options is not confusing any more.


> > Now, I'm looking for some KDE project ideas that I can propose for that
> > contest. [...]
>
> http://wiki.kde.org/tiki-index.php?page=KDE%20Google%20SoC%202006%20ideas
>
> There are quite a few leftovers.

These are almost exclusively coding projects (and some are out of date or 
already implemented, I suppose). I was mainly looking for some 
non-purely-coding projects (artwork, UI polishing, work on HCI guidelines and 
maybe their implementation, cleaning up configs etc.)

> > The other possibility would be topics for bachelor or master theses
> > or other lab projects. The problem is just that the students hardly know
> > C++ [...]
>
> People often mention this, but it's not like C++ was a standard
> teaching language for more than a few years.  It was kind of a stopover
> language in the late 90s on the way from Pascal to Java.  All things
> considered, it's a lot easier to learn C++ coming from Java than most
> languages.

I totally agree. The only concepts that are hard to understand for a java 
developer are pointers and the need to free memory that you have allocated 
(and thus also that there are two different ways to create objects).

Cheers,
Reinhold

- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, Vienna University of Technology, Austria
email: reinhold at kainhofer.com, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial and Actuarial Mathematics, TU Wien, http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/
 * K Desktop Environment, http://www.kde.org, KOrganizer maintainer
 * Chorvereinigung "Jung-Wien", http://www.jung-wien.at/
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