GSoC 2010 ideas needed

[todd rme]

I have some ideas for project suggestions, although I don't know if
they are any good so I would prefer to run them by everyone here
first:

Okular: Okular supports viewing opendocument text (ODT) documents, but
there are a number of other popular document formats that it would be
good to support.  This includes opendocument spreadsheets, graphics,
presentations, and formulas (ODS, ODG, ODT, and ODF, respectively), as
well as Microsoft Office formats, including the 97/XP/2003 formats and
the 2007/2010 formats.  These would probably involve making
reader-only filters based on the filters being developed for KOffice,
but I am not sure.  The project would probably involve support for one
of the three sets of formats, either finishing opendocument support,
doing office 97 support, or doing office 2007 support.  Office 97
support is probably the most pressing considering its popularity.

KDElibs: Currently KDE does not have support of any sort for more than
3 mouse buttons.  This is partly a limitation of Qt, but it can be
worked around by overloading Qt functions.  It is one of KDE's
most-demanded features and has been for longer than KDE has been using
bugzilla (at least 8 years, see
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34362).  It is also an
accessibility issue for many users who can't move the mouse much or
use the keyboard well.  There would be three possible solutions.  What
I consider the poorest solution would be to write a configuration tool
for an existing Linux mouse button to keyboard shortcut utility.  This
would not integrate well with KDE and would force users to configure
two things, first the mouse and then the keyboard keys it was mapped
to.  What I consider a better solution would be to integrate mouse
buttons support directly into the current KDE shortcut system,
allowing you to use mouse buttons in keyboard shortcuts.  What I
personally consider the optimal solution, though, would be to create a
pluggable system for shortcuts, where people can write backends that
provide shortcut information to the KDE shortcut system.  The existing
keyboard shortcut system would be converted to a plugin and a mouse
plugin would be created.  Other future plugins could include an IR
remote plugin, a joystick plugin, a bluetooth device plugin, and so
on.  See the following bug report for a discussion of such a system:
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=171295

KDEbase: different KDE apps use different, inconsistent tab bars.  One
example is between dolphin and konqueror, where dolphin tabs are moved
with the left mouse button and konqueror tabs are moved with the
middle tab button.  The purpose of this project would be to convert
all "official" KDE applications (so not including apps like amarok and
digikam) to the same tab system, probably the qttabbar used by
Dolphin.  See http://userbase.kde.org/User:RalphMW/tabbing, and there
is a discussion in the usability mailing list as well.

Marble: currently one major remaining difference between marble and
google earth is that google earth uses an opegl renderer to allow you
to look at a map from an angle other than top-down.  Marble does not
have this, but I recall from discussions with Marble developers that
they want to ultimately have this.  The purpose of the project would
be to implement this.  The Marble developers will need to comment on
whether this is a good idea or not, I don't know.

KIO: KIO is great for applications that support it, but non-KDE
applications do not.  Linux has a general method for user-space
mounting of filesystems called FUSE.  There was work on a bridge
between kio and fuse that would allow you to mount KIO slaves in a way
that is visible to the entire Linux system, but this appears to have
died.  Gnome's VFS already supports this, but KDE does not.  The
purpose of this project is to implement such a system for KDE.

I may think of more later, but hopefully there are at least a few
useful ideas in here somewhere.

-Todd

On Thu, Feb 4, 2010 at 6:05 PM, Lydia Pintscher <lydia at kde.org> wrote:
> Heya folks :)
>
> Jeff, Leo, Ian and I will be admins for GSoC again this year.
> I just prepared the necessary wiki pages to get us started and copied
> over content where I could. Please help me fill
> http://community.kde.org/GSoC/2010/Ideas with great project ideas and
> polish http://community.kde.org/GSoC
> Those two pages need to be ready and filled with ideas by March 8th
> but it would be most awesome if it is done earlier and I would not
> have to poke people last minute. Thank you so much.
>
> Let me know if you have any questions and please spread it to your subprojects.
>
>
> Cheers
> Lydia
>
> --
> Lydia Pintscher
> Amarok community manager
> kde.org - amarok.kde.org - kubuntu.org
> claimid.com/nightrose
>
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