Ideas for Student Projects

[Kenneth Wimer]

On Friday 09 February 2007 13:15:20 Reinhold Kainhofer wrote:
> 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.
>

Rearranging the thousand different options is not going to make anything 
simpler/better. The fact of the matter is that our config dialogs are 
mainly "by developer, for developer".

Just look at the menu items in Konqueror and then try to change _anything_. 
You'll get angry developers telling you why they have to have it that way, 
and another bunch of more friendly developers telling you that it is 
impossible to change.

> > > 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.)
>

as far as HCI (artwork, usability accesability) we can certainly use all the 
help we can get. Can't think of any specific ideas at this time, but there 
are certainly a few out there.

> > > 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

Ken