Submitted by Andrew Min gives a taster of the open source goodies being developed at Google’s Summer of Code: a GUI for Aptitude, a GUI for Grub 2, search based menu browsing for GIMP and Audacity file import/export with FFmpeg amongst others. Read (or listen to) to the full article at Freesoftware Magazine
A GUI for aptitude? What for? Aptitude rocks because it’s way faster than synaptic. I certainly wouldn’t bother with it if it had a slow UI. I don’t see what advantage it would have over Synaptic at that point.
For VLC on WinCE… I wonder if they will look at Qt. Since the new VLC interface is done in Qt, and Qt runs on WinCE, it would seem to make sense. Same with VLC on Maemo. Makes sense to share as much code as possible.
Theme support for Pidgin… Hmm. I think this is a bad idea personally. Theming does not belong in individual apps for the most part. Unless you have a very specialized app, it should be using standard widgets. Otherwise theme the whole environment.
Also the cube effect for kwin doesn’t seem like a summer’s worth of work. Many of the other effects are very small.
Otherwise looks cool. I did SoC the first year it was offered, and it was great, teaching me lots.
For one of the best (and most useful) SoC projects, I’d vote for Gnumeric’s multi-dimensional data visualisation. In other words, Gnumeric is getting crosstabs (called pivot-tables in Excel).
Crosstabs were the one big thing that Excel had and Gnumeric didn’t. In a few weeks, that difference will be gone. Yet another reason to drop MS Office… 🙂
Voice recognition is one of those things I am interested in. It seems there is not a single good implementation (with GUI) for Linux platform out there. Atleast none that I have been able to find. So, yeah, I am going to follow how Gabriel Geraldo França Marcondes’s project progresses. If he is successful and speech recognition actually works satisfyingly well (I have no idea if that Sphinx2 is any good) then perhaps it’ll raise some more interest in Sphinx2 and even convince someone to write a full speech recognition suite for the whole GNOME environment.
Note however that I have no interest in using it, I just don’t have any wish to start talking to my computer. It’s just that Windows has a gazillion suites for this and I feel Linux is dragging quite a long way behind. Also, this might be good for handicapped people. Oh, and one more thing: being open-source, it would be possible to adapt the suite to any specific environments and tasks. That’s something closed-source apps don’t allow.
About the rest of the article? The only other thing that interests me is the Control Panel for Wine. If they’d add support for audio/video in Pidgin over the Messenger protocol then I’d be interested, but adding support for that over XMPP? Well…I don’t know a single person who’d use that. I do claim that Messenger is used by a whole lot more people so adding audio/video there would benefit more people. (And no, I don’t have any numbers to back up my claim. It’s just that, a claim, you can disagree if you wish.)
Most interesting thing for me is framelevel multithreading for ffmpeg. Finally gets me away from coreavc I hope
I know this sounds like me tooting my own horn for something I have a vested interest in but I’d love to see NWAM completed, or atleast phase 1 completed. Right now NWAM in Solaris *very* basic to say the least. It would be nice if it were more than just a dialogue box and more what has been discussed on the project page.
I spent a few days with OpenSolaris 2008.05 and was pleased and impressed with the progress made by Project Indiana. It’s not, in my opinion, quite there yet for a desktop system, but it’s pretty obvious that it will be. As a long time unix advocate, I would be most pleased to see projects like NWAM move forward at a goodly rate.
Some of the designs are just plain awesome; I’m wondering whether the developers are taking their time to ensure that the design is as optimal as they can get before turning it into code.
There are a number of things that need addressing, but from what I have heard through the grape vine, the next version of OpenSolaris should include some cool features that’ll bring it more onto par with Linux distros such as Ubuntu and Fedora.
Kudos to the few mentioned that will get some extra attention from this, but it’s worth noting that the coverage doesn’t represent even 2% of the projects that will be going on. I’d even go so far to say as many of those listed aren’t even some of the most impressive or realistic, just one person’s sampling of a few they know about.
Captain obvious points out that highlighting even just one project for half of the participating orgs would be about 88 projects and would still represent less than 8%. There’s also no guarantee that the student will be successful on their project. About one in five students failed last year, so nothing is guaranteed regardless.
My point? There is a LOT of cool stuff being worked on. Check the projects out for yourself at http://code.google.com/soc/2008/
They’re all listed. Show your support, get involved, help them succeed if you really care.
Cheers!
Sean