Google SoC and Gnome

The results from the Google Summer of Code selection are out and Gnome got twenty-five projects. I'll cover the ones I think are interesting below.

Networking

Adrien Bustany will modify Tracker to search various on-line resources, such as Flickr, Facebook, and Google Docs. Speaking of GD, Thibault Saunier is going to add Google Docs support to Nautilus, allowing the user to treat the docs like local files. In conjuction with Bustany's work, this looks like a big win for Google Apps users (and I'm one). If you're interested in music and videos, Neil Loknath is integrating Banshee and the Telepathy communications framework to share music with your IM contacts and

Mike Urbanski is hooking heavy podcasting support into Miro and Banshee. Zhang Sen is linking Telepathy's Pipes with Gnome Sudoku to make multi-player gaming possible. This is another of the great uses for Telepathy. Finally, Simon Wenner is geolocation data for tasks in Getting Things Gnome.

Integration

Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals is adding Zeitgeist into the new Gnome Shell, planned to be the default desktop for Gnome 3.0, due to be released in 2010. Zeitgeist gives people a time-based view of documents. Sam Thursfield will be integrating GConf into GTK+ to make using GConf keys easier, including using it from Glade. Ian Marcinkowski is moving e-mail into its own independent process, similar to what Telepathy has done for IM and voice/video. David Jordan is going to be adding hooks to windowing allowing applications to expose more information to the Gnome Shell. Florian Ludwig is going to try to use Pulse to make the data avialable at bugs.gnome.org a bit more useful and easier to visualize.

Beautification

Guillaume Béland is planning to convert Nibble to the Clutter OpenGL canvas and add animations, while Timothy Horton want to "blingify" Gnome games by
making Mines a 2.5D program with special effects.

Other Features

Rhythmbox is getting a contextual information pane thanks to John Iacona, while Paul Bellamy is making MTP and iPod sync work on the application.
F-Spot will finally get the ability to handle RAW images through Ruben Vermeersch's work. Gnome Shell doesn't have multiple monitor support yet, but Nathan Lo intends to change that, and Maxim Ermilov will help Gnome Shell developers using Seed by adding support for ECMAScript to the Anjuta IDE. Anjuta also gets Python integration from Ishan Chattopadhyaya.


There are some more projects, too. Take a look at the Gnome SoC page to find out more.

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