More than two months ago, we took a look on the 29 new things that this Google summer of code would bring to the Gnome desktop environment and its various components.
Today it is the “pencils down” for everyone as we finally reached the end of this magnificent program. Interns and mentors have done a great job providing new exciting things to the Gnome users benefit.
1.) Replace lex-bison based parser with handwritten parser in gcalctool
Student: Arth Patel Mentor: Robert Ancell
Result: Patch has been accepted on gnome bugzilla. Working copy is on gcalctool repository (master branch).
2.) Integrate GTG to Gnome-Shell
Student: Baptiste Saleil Mentor: Luca Invernizzi
Result: The plugin for GTG is now working, you can select date/time and notification will be correctly displayed. A GTG Gnome Shell extension is also available!
3.) Activity Development for GCompris, especially Music Education
Student: Beth Mentor: Bruno Coudoin
Result: All six of the initial planning activities for GCompris are now completed! These include a Piano Composition Activity, Name that Note, Play the Rhythms, Play Piano, Explore World Music and Explore Farm Animals. Get everything on this bundle!
4.) Completion of the Gnome Sudoku Vala Port
Student: Chris Baines Mentor: Thomas Andersen
Result: The work is done, but Chris will continue his contributions to make it even better. You can currently find the code on github.
5.) Smarter Searching in GNOME Shell
Student: Tanner Doshier Mentor: Rui Matos
Result: Although Tanner’s work will probably not make it for Gnome 3.6 due to the code freeze and the very little testing, but we will surely benefit from it on Gnome 3.8. You can see most of his work on these three bugs: 640966, 681797, 682050
6.) GNOME Clock
Student: Emily Gonyer Mentor: Seif Lofty
Result: The Gnome Clocks are already ticking and we will probably enjoy them on Gnome 3.6!
7.) Development of a graphical profiler for GNOME
Student: Fabien Parent Mentor: Dodji Seketeli
Result: This was the second time that Fabien participated on a Google Summer of Code so lets double-congratulate him! The ability for nemiver to support multiple perspectives was added, and a perspective that let the user profile an application using perf as profiler was also added. Nemiver is now able to start and profile a process, attach the profiler to a running process, or profile the whole system. The code will probably enter the master on a few days.
8.) Documents: Removable devices support
9.) libosinfo-based express installation for major OSes
Student: fidencio Mentor: Zeeshan Ali
Result: Fabiano only finished the first of the two parts of the initial planning. This includes:
- small fixes in libosinfo
- add support to libosinfo to generate the script in a file
- add suport to osinfo-install-script tool to use the previous one
- add a new entity, called osinfo_install_config_param used to get which are the parameters that can be set in an install script
- add support to generate an install script for Fedora (desktop profile)
- add support to generate an install script for Windws (it covers: win2k, win2k3, win2k3r2, winxp, winvista, win7)
- remove boxes installation scripts and use libosinfo API
10.) GNOME Shell Lock Screen
Student: Giovanni Campagna Mentor: Marina Zhurakhinskaya
Result: Giovanni’s work is quite impressive and the best is that it will be included on Gnome 3.6. Giovanni is already planning on new features to add to Lock Screen for Gnome 3.8!
11.) Proposal to upgrade the UI of Gcalctool
Student: Gopal Krishnan Mentor: Robert Ancell
Result: Gopal has finished the theming of the Calculator and the result is beautiful. He also created a very useful history panel and finishes this summer with a promise to participate again in the next one :)
12.) Collaborative Getting Things GNOME!
Student: Izidor Matusov Mentor: Ploum
Result:
Visit Izidor’s blog to learn more about how you can setup Collaborative GTG on a freshly installed Ubuntu 12.04. It should be easy to translate it for your distribution.
13.) Overhaul the Applications View
Student: Joost Verdoorn Mentor: Florian Mullner
Result: The code to remove mode-switch from the overview has landed in the official GNOME repositories yesterday so we are going to benefit from Joost’s work in Gnome 3.6. What Joost didn’t finish is making the apps view paginated by removing the categories. Many Gnome users complained about this and was finally decided that Joost wouldn’t proceed with doing this.
14.) Ability to save and load virtual machine boxes
Student: Jovanka Mentor: Zeeshan Ali
Result: Not sure what happened with this one :(
15.) Creation of a new library providing models and widgets to display and choose contacts
Student: Laurent C Mentor: Guillaume Desmottes
Result: The empathy-roster-model and empathy-roster-model-manager are ready and got merged into master around the beginning of August! Laurent plans to continue coding and contributing.
16.) Integration of multiple theme based activities in the existing GCompris suite
Student: Matilda Bernard Mentor: Bruno Coudoin
Result: Matilda finished successfully the creation of four new activities that are Intro Gravity, Land Safe, Place your Satellite and Color Mix!
17.) GNOME Documents UIs for Viewing and Editing of File Metadata
Student: Meg Ford Mentor: Cosimo Cecchi
Result: The properties dialog created by Meg was added on Documents during the last week. Unfortunately, the initial planning for Google Docs sharing included some technical difficulties and Meg decided to go with a GData API and gtk sharing dialog, but it is not finished yet :(
18.) Helping on anjuta makes everybody happy
Student: Moritz Lüdecke Mentor: Johannes Schmid
Result: Some of the work is done, but the Clang plugin is not yet finished. Moritz promises that he will complete it in the near future, while also providing some fixes for Anjuta.
19.) GNUcash Android Application
Student: Ngewi Fet Mentor: Muslim Chochlov
Result: Ngewi did a great job and delivered a very useful GnuCash for Android application. Alex tried it a few days ago, and you can read more about it here.
20.) GXml and GObject Serialisation
Student: Richard Schwarting Mentor: Alberto Ruiz
Result: Although Richard wants to do many more things, his main goals were reached. He pushed the changes he has been working on yesterday, and promises to also push some work on automatically serialising collections this week.
21.) Lockdown editor
Student: Rūdolfs Mazurs Mentor: Ryan Lortie
Result: During the summer, the project changed form for the initial vision quite a bit. This resulted in having nothing usable right now unfortunately. As Rudolf says: “It is behind schedule, but I expect this to be working as intended in the 3.8 GNOME release.”
22.) Refactor and Rework the Task Editor of Getting Things Gnome
Student: sscheel Mentor: Luca Invernizzi
Result: Unfortunately the task of rewriting the entire editor from scratch proved to be a very big project and sscheel didn’t get to spend a lot of time on rich text editing, but the new Task Editor is implemented nonetheless. To find out more about how it works, visit sscheel’s blog.
23.) Revamp of the Activity Journal
Student: Stefano Candori Mentor: Thorsten Prante
Result: Stefano did a great job intensifying his efforts on the last two weeks, achieving to fix lots of bugs, polish the application, test it and add two very important features : dynamic time navigation of your activities through the timebar widget and search. You can find the application code here.
24.) Improve overall Mac OS X port of Banshee
Student: Timo Dörr Mentor: Olivier Dufour
Result: All changes made by Timo were now fully merged and will be part of the upcoming Banshee 2.5 development release and (if no major issues arise) the next 2.6 stable release. If you can’t wait, you can download the Banshee Google Summer of Code now, but be aware that it is based on the unstable 2.5 branch.
25.) Voice Control For Banshee
Student: Udesh Liyanaarachchi Mentor: Alexander Kojevnikov
Result: Voice control was added as a community extension a few days ago, but it needs a lot of testing right now. There are some known bugs that need to be addressed but you can already use pocketsphinx to make Banshee “Play” or “Pause” using your voice only! Get the extension from here and learn more about how to install and use it on this website.
26.) Get a useful state to Shotwell Faces tool
Student: Valentín Barros Puertas Mentor: Lucas Beeler, Adam Dingle
Result: Valentin is still working to reincorporate Faces Tool to Shotwell main repository by fixing bugs that are dissatisfying Yorba high quality standards. He will continue working for the next few weeks and hopefully finish soon, but you can’t get anything useful from this project right now :(
27.) Anti Phishing Daemon For GNOME
Student: Yann Soubeyrand Mentor: Xan Lopez
Result: The anti-phishing-daemon is now fully implemented and is available in this repository. If you want to interact with it, look at the code sample here.
28.) Add synchronization to Epiphany
Student: William Ting Mentor: Xan Lopez
Result: Not sure what happened with this one :(
29.) Support for Gamepad API in WebKitGTK+ and general gamepad configuration options in System Settings
Student: Žan Doberšek Mentor: Carlos Garcia Campos
Result: The gamepads panel and the plugin are ready to help you enjoy some gaming under Gnome! You can get more details about the project on its homepage.
I think that we all agree that this summer was a very successful one for Gnome. The 29 interns that showed their interest in working on new Gnome technologies proves that our favorite desktop environment is very appealing to the developers of tomorrow. I hope all of them continue to contribute to Gnome on the future as this was just the beginning really. You all did a great jot offering things of real value to us Gnome users and we are grateful for this :)
There is really no failure for anyone, even for the projects that have nothing usable to offer today – after three months, as even this has something new to offer like new goals for the projects, experience and acknowledgment of the reasons behind this “failure” that can help both mentors and interns work better together next year!
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