SoK/Ideas/2014

Ideas

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.

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.

Project: Sample project

Brief explanation:

Expected results:

Knowledge Prerequisite:

Mentor:

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.

Project: Live demo for KWin Effects

Brief explanation: The idea is to offer a live demo for the available KWin effects. This would consists of starting a nested KWin instance as a sub-session and completely control it from the outside. E.g. for the Present Windows Effect it would be needed to have several windows open, control the mouse cursor to demonstrate the screen edge activation, support faking keyboard input for the filtering, etc.

The demo mode would have to use the Wayland backend in KWin as that's the only way to get OpenGL in a nested session (Xephyr doesn't reliable support it). This means part of the project would involve implementing missing features in the Wayland backend like for example a windowed mode and the interfaces to fake keyboard input (needed for e.g. on-screen displays). It also requires to complement the work on running nested KWin instances and better separate it. At the moment it's possible to control the DBus service name, similarly it would be needed to change the config file and kglobalaccel module name, etc.

Expected results: Infrastructure in place and at least one Effect which can be run in a live demo.

Knowledge Prerequisite: C++/Qt, Wayland would be preferable

Mentor: Martin Gräßlin

Project: Theme designing for Pairs

Brief explanation: Pairs is a relatively new educational aplication of KDE Edu family. Pairs stimulates your memory and logic skills. It aims to help the learning for pre-school kids. The student should download, install this application and use it and also improve documentation describing the main elements of the interface, such as how to open a theme, create a new one and add all the needed information to have it ready for usage, apart from developing new creative themes that could be available as add-ons.

Expected results: New creative and witty themes for Pairs, improved documentation and proper white space indentation of the code

Knowledge Prerequisite: Qt, QML, XML would work

Expected mentors: Marco Calignano ([email protected]) | Aleix Pol ( [email protected] ) | Heena Mahour ([email protected] )