Yay! Google is
opening up its
“Summer of Code” for 2008. Google’s Summer of Code program encourages students to tackle open-source projects over the summer break. For a 2-3 more days, sponsor organizations are invited to apply and then students can apply starting March 24th. I’ve been thinking about some projects that I’d enjoying seeing. If anyone needs ideas, I’d love to see some of these projects:
- Synergy is a fantastic way to control multiple computers with one mouse/keyboard. You can even move your mouse directly from one computer’s display seamlessly to the other computer’s display. But Synergy currently doesn’t support drag/drop between computers or file transfer between computers. Adding drag/drop sounds like a great summer project to me.
- Tweak Google Browser Sync to synchronize user-defined spelling dictionaries between computers.
- I don’t know about anyone else, but personally I’d love a Google Account sign-in for WordPress. If you wrote the plug-in in a pretty general way, you could no doubt also use it for OpenID, Yahoo accounts, Live IDs, TypeKey, etc. But mainly I’d like to use my Google Account to leave authenticated comments on WordPress blogs.
- Better tools to reverse engineer USB devices so that they can work on Linux in user space.
- Extend Firefox 3 Places to provide more complete tab history: when a tab was closed, whether a page was opened in a new tab or a new window, and basically anything to let a user see a “watertight” view of their surfing.
- Better screencasting support for Linux. Windows has Camtasia and CamStudio. The tools on Linux just aren’t as polished.
- Better video editing software in Linux. Or get parts of GIMPshop into the GIMP.
- Better podcasting support in Audacity.
- A Firefox extension or Greasemonkey to report webspam to Google. The extension would let you report a spam webpage from a button on a toolbar. The extension would also add a “Report as Spam!” button to Google’s search results page.
- A simple tool to backup your entire Google account (email, calendar, docs, feeds, etc.).
- Work to make Ubuntu more suitable for the coming wave of computers with Linux pre-installed (Wal-mart PC, Asus EEE).
- The world always needs better, more streamlined virtualization.
- Beef up the features on brainstorm.ubuntu.com . For example, let each user see all the ideas that they’ve voted for.
- Help out on Google Gears or Android.
- Make Juice run better on Linux.
- Make Asterisk easier to install and configure.
- Implement the functionality of the dragdropupload extension directly into Firefox.
- Add the ability to drag/drop images in WordPress, and let WordPress handle uploading the image to a preferred location on your webhost.
- Make the standard version of Ubuntu boot even faster.
- Add some nice features to Wine, ReactOS or Abiword.
- How about a good open-source program to manage your book library? Something like the Delicious Library program, but that works with Linux?
What about you? If you could request a student to work on any open-source project this summer, what would you ask for?
Summer of Code 2008: 21 potential projects - Read More...
