GSoC 2010/Project ideas
Maemo provides a framework for developing applications for mobile devices, as well as porting existing applications in the Linux world. Look at the projects available at garage.maemo.org to get an idea of what already exists, in order to come up with your brand new ideas. They can be new functionality added to a consolidated application, a first prototype for promising new applications exploring new functionality, or a small but killer application bringing the unexpected. We recommend you to propose small challenges that can be completed successfully instead of big plans impossible to conclude in 3 months. It's useful to develop a cool new module to be used by other applications or setting a first stone in a project to attract new attention.
Add your project ideas to the table below.
If you are an accepted mentor and want to mentor one of the possible projects, add your name to the table with your maemo.org nickname (eg. Valério Valério (vdvsx)).
Note: Everybody can add ideas to the list, there's no need to be a mentor or a student. Don't try to guess if your idea will be implemented in Maemo6 or not, just add it to the list. Maemo SW will help in order to avoid duplicated work.
Ideas List
Note: This list isn't exclusive, if you are a student and have an idea that isn't listed here, don't hesitate to apply with your own idea, but it's probably a good idea to ask in the Maemo community opinions about your idea.
Other possible projects/ideas can be grabbed from the Maemo community wish-list, ports wish-list and you can also take a look at the Maemo documentation in order to have some ideas.
All the ideas below are possible GSoC projects, some of them need more investigation work than others that are already in a final stages, but all of them start at the same level for us. The students must do some investigation before proposing a project; we are here to help, but it isn't acceptable to just copy and paste the descriptions below to the student's applications.
| Final proposal | Study of alternatives needed | Draft proposal |
| Title | Abstract/Description | Skills | Difficulty (Easy/Medium/Hard) | Reporter | Possible Mentor(s) | Comments | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dooble Web Browser | Porting http://dooble.sf.net webkit browser to maemo platform | maemo SDK, packaging an installer | easy | http://dooble.sf.net | http://dooble.sf.net | If someone is interested in a webbrowser on maemo, we would mentor it | |
| Facebook Events Sync | Creating an application/daemon to synchronise facebook events to the calendar | maemo SDK, packaging an installer | easy | cocayden | |||
| RetroShare Messenger | Porting RetroShare Messenger | maemo SDK, packaging an installer | middle | http://retroshare.sf.net - http://retromessenger.sf.net | |||
| Google Reader Offline | Creating an application synchronize with Google Reader to enable offline-reading of Google Reader's contents. | maemo SDK, packaging an installer | easy | bob | |||
| OTR Support for Telepathy | Integrate libotr support in the existing protocol stack | maemo SDK, packaging, telepathy, some crypto | medium | ||||
| Remmina remote desktop | Porting Remmina (http://remmina.sf.net), a multi-protocol GTK+ remote desktop client that supports NX, to Maemo | maemo SDK, packaging an installer, familiarity with NX | medium (some missing dependencies, uses newer GLib) | nadavwr | Remmina supports VNC and RDP, and more importantly trunk has functional NX support. It has zooming and panning features, making it appealing for low resolution displays.
The main motivation is having usable NX remoting on the N900, which would be game changing (for those who need it, anyway...) | ||
| mAuth (pronounced moth) | The N900 is a very powerful device, however we can't shake away the fact that many of us still use desktops on a daily basis. Using username/password authentication is highly insecure, because it forces the repeated typing of the same credentials in the same room, roughly at the same time every day. One option for this are smart cards. However they are expensive and the concepts behind them are extremely complicated for anyone who doesn't work in the industry, and as such implementing them at home would be a nightmare. One solution around this would be to have the N900 (or any other NIT for that matter) emulate being a smart card, and use bluetooth to connect to the computer. The authentication and encryption certificates are stored on the N900 and provided to the computer when in bluetooth range, however as soon as the N900 is taken away, the session is locked as the computer believes the "smart card" has been removed. | - Maemo SDK to create the smart card emulator daemon - Bluetooth networking or bluetooth bi-directional communication - PC/SC driver for Windows - Excellent documentation - great packaging | extremely hard (probably impossible) | crashanddie 07:46, 20 February 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Pocket Jeeves | Creating a framework, API and UI to provide context-based voice interaction with Maemo. Brainstorm entry | packaging, dbus, basic discrete math (language modeling), gstreamer, maemo SDK | Hard (mostly due to scope). This is entirely feasible, but will take a significant amount of work to tie together everything. I have built Pocket Sphinx on Fremantle and it works as-is. Flite is already in the repos. The pieces are all there... | Flandry | Think handsfree mode, but for your entire mobile computer. Click the button on your headset and your Maemo butler asks "What can i do for you?" The accuracy and speed of the speech recognition can be immensely helped by making context-based grammars. E.g. if media player is operational, "next", "skip" and "softer" would all be understood. This lends itself well to sub-projects for multiple people to work on. Would like to help/mentor but not really qualified for the latter and have to graduate so no time. ;) | ||
| aGLESory | Adapt or implement a flexible OpenGL wrapper for Maemo. | OpenGL, libraries and gcc, packaging, documentation, maemo SDK | Medium | Flandry | This really needs no introduction...we all know how huge it would be to have a painless wrapper for at least basic OpenGL functionality. This project would be about getting someone to blaze the path and mark it clearly. | ||
| Google apps | Implement small applications and corresponding reusable libraries (Qt C++) for integrating with Google services like Mail (quick read/search without going through IMAP), Todo:s, Buzz, import opml from Google Reader | Qt, api design | Medium | vivainio 08:13, 23 February 2010 (UTC) | |||
| Robotics Simulator | Bring a full-blown robotics simulator to Maemo/MeeGo. For the start, the 2.5D simulator Player/Stage (http://playerstage.sf.net) would be ported and a simple GUI be written. Later integration with Fawkes (http://www.fawkesrobotics.org) can provide some nice demos and scripting environment to start into robotics. If there is interest in this project some studies are needed to check whether the device is generally computationally powerful enough for simple scenarios. Although not a classic Maemo application, this can be seen as an educational effort to get students interested and start playing with (virtual) robots. | Maemo SDK, packaging, Player/Stage, Fawkes, background in robotics software strongly recommended | Hard | timn | Given a mentor I would like to pursue this project over the summer. It can be an eye catcher for the N900, if you can have a simulated robot on the device and instruct it to accomplish tasks. | ||
| Oscilloscope | xoscope] to maemo, using the microphone port as an input | GTK/X11 | speculatrix |