GSOC project ideas

[todd rme]

I have some ideas for GSOC projects that might be able to be put on
the wiki.  They fit with this year's theme of "polishing existing
things".  They may or may not be appropriate, so feel free not to use
them if you don't like them:

1. Make step work well for orbital simulations.  Currently step is
capped at 16x speed for simulations, which is much too slow to
simulate something like the Earth/Moon system, not to mention the
Earth/Sun system.  Its performance is also very bad when simulating,
for example, the space shuttle orbiting the Earth.  The project would
also involve allowing users to specify orbital characteristics in an
object's properties, such as aphelion, perihelion, orbital period, etc
and let step automatically calculate the other properties.  There
should also be some examples.

2. Support saving variables and functions across sessions in kalgebra.
 In kalgebra you can create variables and functions, but they are lost
when you close and restart.  There are different approaches to this
(such as right-clicking and setting it persistent, automatically
restoring them from the last session, etc).  A mechanism to clear
variables and functions will also be needed.