GSoC/2010/Ideas - KDE Community Wiki

Guidelines

Information for Students

These ideas were contributed by our developers and users. They are sometimes vague or incomplete. If you wish to submit a proposal based on these ideas, you may wish to contact the developers and find out more about the particular suggestion you're looking at.

Being accepted as a Google Summer of Code student is quite competitive. Accepted students typically have thoroughly researched the technologies of their proposed project and have been in frequent contact with potential mentors. Simply copying and pasting an idea here will not work. On the other hand, creating a completely new idea without first consulting potential mentors is unlikely to work out.

When writing your proposal or asking for help from the general KDE community don't assume people are familiar with the ideas here. KDE is really big!

If there is no specific contact given you can ask questions on the general KDE development list [email protected]. See the KDE mailing lists page for information on available mailing lists and how to subscribe.

Adding a Proposal

When adding an idea to this section, please try to include the following data:

if the application is not widely known, a description of what it does and where its code lives
a brief explanation
the expected results
pre-requisites for working on your project
if applicable, links to more information or discussions
mailing list or IRC channel for your application/library/module
your name and email address for contact (if you're willing to be a mentor)

If you are not a developer but have a good idea for a proposal, get in contact with relevant developers first.

Ideas

Amarok

Amarok is a powerful KDE based music player for Linux and Unix, MacOS X and Windows with an intuitive interface. It makes playing the music you love and discovering new music easier than ever before - and it looks good doing it!

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #amarok on Freenode.

Project: On the Fly Transcoding

Brief explanation: Allow media to be seamlessly transcoded to another format whenever it is copied from one collection to another.

Expected results: Amaroks concept of collections allows media to be easily moved and copied around. In many cases however, the format you want in one collection is not the same as you might want it to be in when copying it to another collection. A common example is having your entire local collection in lossless FLAC, but wanting to copy songs to a mobile device that only supports mp3 (or even if the device supports open formats, you might want to transcode it to ogg to save space). On completion of this project, an option to enable transcodeing should be integrated into the "Move/Copy to collection" flow in a way that it is available whenever this is used between 2 collections. A big part of this project will be to determine the most suited library or application to use as the backend of the transcoding engine.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Knowledge of C++ and Qt is a requirement. Knowledge of media formats and the different available apps and libraries for transcoding them is a bug plus.

Mentor: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <[email protected]> or another Amarok developer.

Project: Distributed Collections

Brief explanation: Allow several instances of Amarok on a network, each with their own distinct local collection, to seamlessly search, browse music from each other.

Expected results: On completion of the project, it should be possible to allow other instances of Amarok to access your local collection, as well as have access to the collection of other instances of Amarok, if their users allow it. A protocol for searching, browsing and streaming music should be in place, either developed from scratch or based on an existing standard (if a suitable one can be found). Issues such as authentication and auto discovery must be considered and a solution found.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Knowledge of C++ and Qt is required. Knowledge of XML, JSON or other data exchange schemes will be a big benefit, As there are many open question in this project, the student is also required to be capable of independently coming up with ideas for solutions to many issues, so a high degree of creativity and independence is required.

Mentor: Nikolaj Hald Nielsen <[email protected]> or another Amarok developer.

Project: Amarok & KDE UPnP integration

Brief explanation: UPnP is a network auto-discovery and services protocol that among other things allows serving media to connected devices in the local network.

By creating a UPnP KIO slave and supporting infrastructure it becomes possible to access this media directly from any KDE application. In Amarok some extra integration is needed to make the UPnP MediaServer a full Collection. This includes indexing the contents locally when the server has no, or limited support for search.

Expected results:

A UPnP KIO slave based on an already existing or in development framework for UPnP.
An Amarok Collection implementation including a functional QueryMaker using UPnP-search or MemoryQueryMaker.
Optionally a PlaylistProvider implementation for UPnP-native playlists and playlist files found on the server.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and UPnP. KIO-slave or Amarok experience is recommended.

Mentor: Bart Cerneels

digiKam

Photo Management program

digiKam project web site - Mailinglist - IRC channel: #digikam on Freenode.

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Brief explanation:

Expected results:

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KDE Edu

Sabine Emmy Eller suggested the development of a “general conversion tool” for tables to various xml formats and from one xml to another xml format etc. where one can add further formats over time would be great. If this is a good idea we can actually start to think about more detailed specifications for what we need.

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Project: Community Integration for KStars

Brief explanation: This feature is expected to be of use to amateur (hobby) astronomers. The idea is that there are aspects of amateur astronomy which are collaborative. For instance, one might want to view observations by other amateur astronomers around the world before making an observation of an object. Again, one would like to share their own observations with everyone else. There are more possibilities, and the student is encouraged to come up with them.

KStars produces observation logs in an XML format that is expected to adhere to the OAL 2.0 schema. The project will involve extending the existing implementation of the OAL 2.x schema and ensuring that it is fully compatible with the schema. The next target would be to make it possible to retrieve observation logs in XML format from the internet and present it to the user in a nicely accessible manner. The user should also be able to (eventually) submit his own logs to a server.

Expected results: Better OAL 2.x compliance in KStars, Ability to retrieve observation logs from the internet, Ability to export one's own observations in XML format to a server.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++. Familiarity with Qt and XML parsing will help.

Mentor: Prakash Mohan <prakash DOT mohan AT kdemail DOT net> / Akarsh Simha <akarsh DOT simha AT kdemail DOT net>

Project: OpenGL support for KStars

Brief explanation: KStars currently renders graphics using QPainter. To provide a realistic and aesthetic representation of the night-sky, GL functionalities like texture-mapping will be beneficial. The aim of this project would be to use the Qt OpenGL module to render graphics in KStars.

Expected results: More realistic simulation of the night-sky, better aesthetic appeal.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++. Knowledge of Qt and OpenGL will greatly help.

Mentor: Akarsh Simha <akarsh DOT simha AT kdemail DOT net>

Project: Additional Catalogs in KStars

Brief explanation: KStars currently knows about deep-sky objects from the NGC and IC catalogs and stars from the Henry-Draper catalog. Popular objects from many other catalogs are not listed [eg: Collinder] and multiple designations for the same object are not supported. The aim of this project is to implement support for objects from SAO, UGC, PGC, MCG, PK and Saguaro Astronomy Club catalogs. The student could also consider revamping the way data is stored and accessed in KStars :-).

Expected results: Support for multiple designations, Many more catalogs in KStars.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Database handling will help.

Mentor: Akarsh Simha <akarsh DOT simha AT kdemail DOT net>

Project: Rocs - Graph File Formats and Teacher Mode

Rocs is a Graph Theory IDE to study and learn Graph Theory.

Brief explanation: Rocs lacks graphs formats. it currently supports one internally and GML by the amazing work that Wagner is doing on it's plugin system. but we do need more: dot, gml, umbrello files, anything graph - like should be openable by rocs. Also, teacher mode is a mode with various graph scripts ( coloring, smaller path, bigger path, etc. all of the algorithms studied in Graph Theory + a few more )

Expected results: Rocs should be able to open almost all of the graph files around, and also in teacher mode, the student could test if his algorithm is correct by comparing the results with the one in the teacher mode.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Qt - C++ - Javascript are prerequisites. all the rest is optional, but being in a Graph Theory class at university could be cool ;)

Mentor: Tomaz Canabrava

KDE Games

Project: KHighscore2 library

Brief explanation: The KDE Games module features the libkdegames library, which provides common components for games, such as network access and standard UI elements. Among these classes is the highscore system KHighscore, which is starting to show its age. We want you to write a successor based on Qt's model/view framework.

Expected results: The coding work itself should not be too hard, but you need to create a future-proof object-oriented design. The games in the KDE games module have very different requirements for a highscore system, we expect you to evaluate these and come up with a concept that fits most requirements. Backwards compatibility to existing highscore records is desired. When the library is finished, you should port as many of our games to the new classes.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt. Profound experience with Qt's model/view framework.

Mentor: none at the moment (contact [email protected] mailing list for further questions)

KDE libs

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KDevelop

KDE-based Integrated Development Environment, specializing in c++ support, but including a powerful generic framework (definition use chain) which makes it possible to relatively easily support multiple different languages.

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #kdevelop on Freenode.

Project: Quanta+ 4

Brief explanation: Quanta+ 4

Expected results: Revive the Quanta+ brand for KDE 4 and provide a usable IDE for webdevelopment. Take advantage of the KDevelop framework and reuse it's plugins and adapt them to give the user a good experience while programming PHP, CSS, HTML and JavaScript.

Knowledge Prerequisite: KDE, Qt, KDevplatform/KDevelop

Mentor: Niko Sams

Project: Community Integration

Brief explanation: Integrate community related workflow, e.g. VCS support, in KDevelop.

Expected results: Integrate a proper VCS support for SVN and Git into KDevelop and see what other aspects of a community related workflow could be integrated.

Knowledge Prerequisite: KDE, Qt, KDevplatform/KDevelop

Mentor: Andreas Pakulat

KDE PIM

KDE PIM is the interest group working on applications related to personal information management, e.g. contacts, calendar, mails, etc.

One of the current challenges is utilizing the new cross-desktop PIM infrastructure called Akonadi.

There are interesting projects on all levels of the software stack: libraries, application porting, new applications, access to online resources, etc.

Website - Project Wiki - Mailing list - IRC channel: #kontact and #akonadi on Freenode.

For a list of ideas that are not yet fully spelled out, see the brainstorming list of Summer of Code ideas of the last PIM meeting.

Project: New Kontact summary based on Plasma

Brief explanation: Create a new summary for Kontact that is based on Plasma.

Expected results: The new Kontact summary should be based on Plasma and have every feature that the old summary had. The summary should look nice and have lots of bling. It should be possible to place single components of the summary on the desktop as well, as plasmoids.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt knowledge is needed, Plasma experience would be welcome.

Mentor:

Project: Improved HTML support for KMail's composer

Brief explanation: The HTML support for KMail's composer is currently limited. This should be improved: Replying and forwarding should (optionally) preserve the HTML format. The composer should use WebKit editing so that all HTML is fully supported.

Expected results: Replying and forwarding HTML mails should be fully supported. The QTextEdit-based widget in the composer should be replaced by a WebKit-based widget, to support all HTML instead of a small subset.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt

Mentor: Thomas McGuire

Project: Improved theming support for the message viewer

Brief explanation: In KMail, it is currently possible to chose between different header styles, such as 'fancy' or 'brief'. These header styles currently have to be written in C++.

The goal of this project is to use the Grantlee library to provide better and easier theming support.

Expected results: The viewers of KMail, KNode and Akregator should all be ported to Grantlee. Some defaults themes should be provided, at least replacing the existing 'fancy' and 'standard' themes.

Optionally, Get Hot New Stuff should be used so that the user can easily download new themes.

Optionally, the user should have some sort of control over which header fields of the mail are displayed, see Wish 16270.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt

Mentor: Thomas McGuire, Stephan Kelly(?)

Project: Easy Import and Export of all PIM data in Kontact

Brief explanation: There should be an easy way to import and export all PIM data including the configuration data, to make it easy to exchange data and to move the Kontact data to another installation.

Expected results: There should be a central way in Kontact to import and export all data. Right now, some individual applications have their own ways to import and export data, and this should be unified. The new import and export tool should be able to deal with the following

Configuration data, such as applications settings and account settings
The actual data, such as mails, feeds, contacts and calendar entries
Metadata, such as Nepomuk tags and annotations or Akonadi item flags
Cached data, such as the cache of an IMAP account, to avoid re-downloading the mails

It should be possible for the user to have a fine-grained selection of the above so that the user can decide what to export or import.

Ideally, it should be possible to export all this to a single archive file which can be later re-imported.

There are several bug reports on [bugs.kde.org the KDE bugtracker] that request something like this, you might get additional ideas from them.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt

Mentor:

Project: Unified account wizard for Kontact

Brief explanation: Provide a nice wizard that can set up all of Kontact in one go and is easily extensible to support new configuration templates. The wizard should set up accounts/resources for all Kontact components.

As an example, let's say the user has a Google account: That includes Google Mail, Google Calendar, Google Contacts and Google Reader. The wizard should only ask for the username and password of the Google account of the user, and then set up Akonadi resources for mail, calendar, contacts and feeds automatically.

This should of course not be limited to Google: The system should be based on configuration templates so that many popular providers can be supported. Writing such configuration templates should require no coding so that many people write them, leading to a broader support of providers in the wizard

Expected results:

Write and integrate a usable wizard for Kontact that combines setting up accounts/resources for mail, calendar, contacts and maybe more.
Make it easy to use: The user should only need to input the bare minimum of information, and the wizard auto-detects all the correct settings, based on configuration templates
Provide as many sample configuration templates for popular services as possible, for example for Google, AOL and other popular providers
Optionally, integrate Get Hot New Stuff so that it is possible to download new configuration templates.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt

Mentor:

Project: More Nepomuk Integration in Kontact

Brief explanation: Nepomuk provides wide possibilities of doing cool new things. The goal of this project is to come up with interesting ideas on how Nepomuk could improve Kontact, and implement the ideas.

Some possibilities:

Activity Journal for Kontact
Project-Centric Views
Person-Centric Views

Expected results:

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++ and Qt

Mentor:

Project: Personalized email addresses for each contact

Brief explanation:Facilitate usage of a different email address for each contact.

Expected results: For instance, if the user owns the domain mickeymouse.com then when he is communicating with [email protected] he would use the personalized address [email protected], and when he is communicating with [email protected] he would use the address [email protected]. The Thunderbird email client supports this with the Virtual Identity extension. See bugs https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72926 and https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159251

Knowledge Prerequisite:

Mentor:

Note: This entry was not added by KDEPIM developers. It is not enough for a complete Summer of Code project, and should be extended in case this idea is used as a project proposal.

Project: Kmail filter on Thread

Brief explanation: Facility in Kmail filter to move messages to folders based on thread

Expected results: User can define filters based on the "In-Reply-to:" message-id of a new message (message A) matching the message-id of an existing message in an existing mail folder (message B). On match, option to move Message A to the folder that contains Message B. This will help in continuing threads in the same folder in which they were started.

Please mail me if the problem statement or the requirement for this feature is not clear enough. Raj Mathur, raju at linux dash delhi dot org

Knowledge Prerequisite: Presumably, knowledge of KMail, understanding of the e-mail message RFC, C++.

Mentor: Whoever's interested and thinks this is a good idea.

Note: This entry was not added by KDEPIM developers. It is in general a nice idea. To make this work, threading has to be done independent from the message list. For example, an Akonadi agent could add attributes to the items that contain threading info. The filter and the message list would read these attributes. This requires a significant rewrite of the message list, and writing a threading agent. Also, this potentially requires fixing the Akonadi filtering framework, which is not yet integrated in KMail 2. All of the above certainly makes this enough for a complete Summer of Code project. Having filters that can read threading information would only be a side effect of all those changes.

KDE Finance

KDE Finance is an emerging group of applications dedicated to financial topics, such as Personal Finances Management, Invoices Management, Point of Sales...

Plasma Dashboard in Skrooge

Skrooge is a Personal Finances Manager, a part of KDE extragear.

Brief explanation: Skrooge currently has a module called Dashboard that contains several widgets showing various information about your financial situation. However we are reinventing the plasma wheel in many areas, so we'd like to switch it to plasma. The dashboard could become a generic componenet that would also be used by other applications (kontact ?)

Expected results:

implement a newspaper view that will receive skroogoids.
write a dataengine providing data from the current skrooge file (which is in fact an SQLite database).
create some skroogoids that should be displayed in the newspaper view. Ability to display them on the desktop, without skrooge being opened is something to be discussed (a skrooge file may be password protected using QCA, no idea how this could be handled).
save the dashboard config inside the Skrooge file (currently not supported by plasma, IIRC)

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++, SQLite, optionnally a scripting language supported by plasma

Mentor: Guillaume DE BURE, + someone from plasma team (?)

KOffice

KPresenter: Create animation effects and tidy our framework, ui

Brief explanation: KPresenter has just gained an animation framework but we need lots of implementations for many kinds of effects. And we need a userinterface to manipulate it.

First step would be to implement loading and showing of about 20 different animation effects. That is actually a simple and contained task which should get you into the basic workings. Next step is to create a user interface.

Expected results: About 20 effects to be implemented. Extend and adapt the animation framework as needed to fulfill that. A user interface for creating and manipulating animations.

Knowledge Prerequisite: basic XML knowledge, C++ and Qt-knowledge, being able to understand complex code.

Mentor: Thorsten Zachmann, Casper Boemann

KSpread: Improve saving to ODF

Brief explanation: ODF is the native fileformat of KSpread. As such one of the most important aspects of KSpread is to be able to load and save OpenDocument Spreadsheet files (ODS). While we are working hard on improving the support for loading, saving is not that well tested yet. The goal would be to change that, to improve the saving to ODF as much as possible. This should be done by adding unittests for loading and saving of ODF documents and fixing bugs where they show up.

First step would be to test different cases and to identify problems. As a starting point a look on the wo rk done on the Schedules, the Specs and the Code may help.

Expected results: Loading, saving and reopening a document should introduce as less unwanted changes as possible. Saving should work as good as loading does already.

Knowledge Prerequisite: ODF specs, Qt-knowledge, being able to understand complex code.

Mentor: Sebastian Sauer

Create an exciting new content type (flake shape)

Brief explanation: KOffice allows developers to create so called flake shapes as plugins. Examples of this are the formula editor, the video player and the music notation shape. We invite the GSoC developer to come up with a content type of his / her own choosing and implement that as a plugin for KOffice.

Expected results: Loading, saving and reopening a document with the shape in it should just work. There should be at least a simple way to edit the content inside the KOffice applications (mouse/keyboard handling, some dialogs).

The project is very flexible and we can have many different ones running at the same time, please feel free to submit more than one if you must. A google search for the musicflake will give you the project from a couple of years back. Further quick examples of shape types may be; knitting patterns, graphs & maths, tagclouds, etc. And naturally its possible to continue working on the existing ones. Like the formula shape and the music shape.

Knowledge requisites:

Add support for e-book formats to KOffice

Brief explanation: Add a new export for one or more formats that are specifically tuned for e-book devices.

With the increased popularity of ebook readers there is going to be a need for tools to create ebook content. While most e-book devices can display PDF there are in fact a lot more formats in use. One such format is .epub, which allows reflowable content (unlike PDF). The format itself is based on XML and uses style sheets (CSS) to format content. There are few free software tools that can generate and manipulate this format and those that exist are restricted to command line.

Since most people creating content will most likely want to use an office suite or word processor to make documents it makes sense to add an export option for this format to KOffice.

Knowledge requisites:

Kopete

http://kopete.kde.org

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KDE on Windows

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KDE on Mac OS X

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KWin

KDE's window manager

Techbase page - Mailinglist - IRC channel: #kwin on Freenode.

KWin scripting support

Brief explanation:

KWin is customizable, but only using GUI options, which limits the possibilities. Adding scripting support would make the possibilities for customization virtually unlimited. See also http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3336.

Expected results:

Wrapping KWin internals in a suitable API and adding scripting using standard KDE/Qt scripting support. It should be possible to control various aspects of windows, query window management data, react on various events and write desktop effects in a usable way (sufficient performance and convenience). Scripting usage should be similar to other places in KDE such as Plasma, as reasonable.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C++, Qt, scripting language (required)
X11 (nice to have, but not required)

Mentor: Lubos Lunak

Nepomuk

Website- Documentation/Howtos - Ontologies - Mailing list - IRC channel: #nepomuk-kde on Freenode.

Web Metadata Extractor Framework and Service

Brief explanation:

Currently, the only metadata for files available is extracted by libstreamanalyzer and obviously it's limited to the metadata already present in files. However, there's a lot more metadata that can be mined from web resources such as lyrics, movie plots and bibliographic data.

We need a plugin-based service, which would slowly crawl indexed files in background and let plugins extract additional metadata based on existing metadata. There must be a way to configure the service and plugins.

The project includes writing a number of useful plugins to "field test" the design to make sure it's viable, serve as examples for other plugin writers and provide a visible benefit to users.

Expected results:

Music: lyrics, extra album metadata(year, track count, trivia), artist/band metadata(birth date, gender).

Video: IMDB data

A convenient interface to configure and enable/disable plugins(say, user might want lyrics but doesn't care about artists), configure the service(such as frequency of recrawling to see if new metadata is available)

Mentor satisfied that plugins can be written to use the service for other purposes.

Knowledge Prerequisite:

C++
Qt
SPARQL and Nepomuk or any other semantic background would help

Mentor:

Sebastian Trueg or Eveny Egorochkin

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Okular

Okular is KDE's document viewer. It is often used for PDF documents, but can handle many other document types.

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Plasma

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #plasma on Freenode.

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Phonon

Abstraction library for sound and video support. Used by KDE notifications, Amarok, Dragon Player and Qt Software.

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #phonon on Freenode.

This year Phonon projects are going to be hosted under the VideoLAN banner. See their webpage for ideas.

Kate

Kate is a powerful programmer's editor.

Website - Mailing list - IRC channel: #kate on Freenode.

Project: Vim-like Swap File

Brief explanation: Add swap file support, like vim has, to limit the effects of crashes.

Expected results: Vim should be able to recover (most of) what was written after last write in case of a crash of power failure.

Knowledge Prerequisite: Knowledge of C++ and Qt is a requirement.

Mentor: Christoph Cullmann <[email protected]>

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