[kde-edu]: [RFC] KPhysics - Interactive physics experiments for KDE

[Albert Astals Cid]

A Dijous 27 Abril 2006 15:00, Jure Repinc va escriure:
> Hi,
>
> I'm a physics student here at University of Ljubljana and I have this
> idea in my head for quite some time (it is one of the reasons I started
> learning C++/Qt/KDE programming). It is an idea about new application
> which would be perfect for KDE Edu. I call it KPhysics for now (if you
> have a suggestion for a better name I would like to hear it).
>
> KPhysics would be similar to some application that my father bought me
> when I was in primary school and it contained videos, pictures and
> explanations of physical experiments. I liked it a lot, but missed the
> interactivity in it (change a parameter and see what happens).
>
> So I decided to start learning how to program and try to make a similar,
> more interactive application for KDE. Now that the summer holidays are
> near I decided to write this e-mail to let you know about my plans and
> to ask about some things.
>
> So here are my plans for KPhysics.
> I would like to make it as modular as possible. For example there would
> be a framework with user interface. All the experiments would be in
> plug-ins (so that anyone could add/remove experiments as easily as
> possible). Those experiment plug-ins would contain one experiment (in
> picture, interactive graphics (maybe even OpenGL), ... ) and commentary
> about it (in HTML). Each plug-om would also have some properties like
> what type of experiment it contains so that you can filter them from the
> user interface (disable OpenGL experiments automatically if no support
> is found on the system, show only experiments from certain filed of
> physics, only experiments for certain level of education system...).
>
> The interface would show the filtered experiments in a tree like
> structure (in categories read from plug-in properties). Maybe something
> like tree shown for folders/files or maybe using HTML hierarchy similar
> to books. It would also be able to browse through experiments using big
> icons view (like in Konqueror).
>
> Well I hope the picture about my idea is clear enough. So now about my
> questions:
>
> Does it make sense to you? Is this framework/plug-ins idea the right one
> for this application? Did I make any mistake when thinking about this
> and do you think I should change this?
>
> How hard is it to make this framework/plug-ins structure?
> Keep in mind that I'm only a beginner C++/Qt/KDE programmer, but willing
> to learn a lot this summer. But I guess I would need quite a lot of help
> and answers from you guys and girls with much more experience.
>
> I was thinking about targeting KDE4, because I guess it will take a bit
> longer until this KPhysics is done and because I would like to learn how
> to program for KDE4, which will also run on Mac OS and Windows and the
> more people can use KPhysics the better
>
> Is it that much harder to program for KDE4 then for KDE3. How fast are
> changes in API? Is there any history/changelog of API changes that is
> updated regularly and that I could easily follow?
>
> Would anyone be willing to be my mentor for the Google Summer of Code
> 2006? Is this even the right kind of the project for SoC?

I received in private a mail from another person that is doing / wants to do 
the same program as you (from your and his "non exact" description) also as a 
Google SoC.

And that's were you can see Goggle SoC failing, collaborate in doing that 
program would be probably the most normal thing, but iirc Google does not 
allow this.

Albert

>
> Well this is all for now. Sorry for a bit longer post. Thanks in advance
> for all your answers and comments.
>
>
> Jure Repinc

		
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