[kde-edu]: GSOC Proposal: Polishing of Parley Practice

[David Capel]

Practice Made (More) Perfect

2009 Summer of Code Application


 David Capel

wot.narg at gmail.com

narg on Freenode

Note: If anyone has further ideas or suggestions for goals, I would be happy
to incorporate them into my proposal.


 *Summary*

I propose, in sum, to make the new (previously-made but currently disabled)
practice modes of Parley release-quality – this entails improvements,
bug-fixes and polishing. Unfortunately, I ran out of time last summer and I
have been extremely busy during my first year of university, so some issues
remain in my original work from last summer. However, bringing the practice
modes to release-quality level allows us to address once and for all many of
the issues that my project last summer aimed to fix.

Because it is fixing a variety of issues, my proposal is more of a
collection of smaller projects than one overarching goal. A benefit of this
is it will break well into small, manageable, and easily-scheduled chunks.

*Goals*

There are four major categories to focus on: UI consistency, Themes, New
modes, and New Features.


 Specific goals for UI (these include both issues with the program itself
and with the default themes):

   -

   Intelligent tab order (this is harder than it might appear, since the
   interface is themable)
   -

   Ensure accelerators and actions are sane and universal
   -

   Consistent UI between modes (this is a theme issue)
   -

   Improved conjugation UI (this is a thorny issue, and will require some
   planning to get right)


Goals for themes:

   -

   Extensive documentation:


   -

      More than one reference
      -

      Detailed tutorial
      -

      Fleshing out the current theming guide
      -

   KNS2 support working
   -

   Theme manager working


 Goals for new modes: (See attached mock-ups)

   -

   Crossword
   -

   Word find
   -

   Others?


 Goals for new features:

Printing support

(This is especially important for Crossword and word find – these will work
on a computer, but are something that a user might want to do by hand, too.)



 *Tentative Timeline *(~13 weeks total)

The first half would be focused towards UI and themes.

2 weeks – Accelerators / actions / tab order

2 weeks – UI improvements (for default theme)

1 week – Conjugation

1 week – Documentation

1 week -- Theme manager / KNS2

----

The second half would be focused on new features and modes.

Printing would be developed in parallel to these, since they are
intertwined:

3 weeks – Crossword

2 weeks – Word find

1 week – Polishing / Other modes? Any suggestions?


 *Qualifications*

I am a (soon-to-be sophomore) freshman at the University of Wisconsin at
Madison majoring in computer science (I've completed about half the degree,
however ;) ) and I've been programming for ~7 years, mostly in C++ and
Python. I know C++, Qt, and the KDE libraries proficiently . Noteworthy
projects I previously have worked on include Parley, a few other minor open
source projects, and a reasonably successful MUD (text-only ancestors of
mmorpgs).

Additionally, I am interested in languages in general and I am actively
learning Spanish, which means I will eat my own dog food (by using Parley as
more than just a developer) and I already have a set of test files created
for the classes I have taken.


 *Other*

Since I worked on Parley last summer, I am familiar with both the codebase
and the KDE build and development processes, which will allow me to be
immediately productive.

If accepted, I would treat my project as a full time job during the summer,
which would preclude other summer jobs or courses.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-edu/attachments/20090319/43cf981d/attachment-0001.htm 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: wordfind.png
Type: image/png
Size: 81337 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-edu/attachments/20090319/43cf981d/attachment-0002.png 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: crossword.png
Type: image/png
Size: 67616 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-edu/attachments/20090319/43cf981d/attachment-0003.png