Summer Coding 2010 student application - Paul Lange

About me

 * 1) Name: Paul Lange
 * 2) E-Mail: palango@gmx.de
 * 3) wiki username: palango
 * 4) irc nickname: palango
 * 5) primary language: German
 * 6) Germany (GMT +1), working from 8pm till 12pm
 * 7) Open-source experience:
 * 8) * I already worked on creating packages for Fedora. I started in the Fonts SIG and then switched to the Mono SIG 1, however still maintaining fonts.
 * 9) * I created some patches for the Banshee Media Player. This was mostly about creating a plugin which imports the song database from Rhythmbox music player (1, 2).

About my project

 * 1) Improve Shotwells slideshow mode
 * 2) I would like to improve the slideshow mode of Shotwell - the new standard photo managment application of Fedora. See the idea and the discussion on the Shotwell mailinglist: 1, 2
 * 3) Shotwell is a relatively young project which aims to create a photo managment software. With Fedora 13 it became the default application for this job. While Shotwell improved a lot with the latest version the slideshow mode didn't get much attention lately. The goal of my project is to change that and add transitions, title display and (if time permits) background music to Shotwell. This will result in a more visually pleasing and better usable slideshow mode and so increate the capabilities of Fedoras default photo manager. As Shotwell is written in Vala my project will be developed using Vala too. To create a flexible, visually pleasing and powerful interface I decided to use Clutter. Clutter is a "library for creating fast, visually rich, portable and animated graphical user interfaces" and provides hardware acceleration and so is perfectly suited for the projects purpose.
 * 4) Schedule:
 * 5) * Week 1: Set up working environment, work into Clutter Api
 * 6) * Week 2-3: Create standalone prototype. This will include a definition of a trasions as well as some transitions.
 * 7) * Week 4: Work into Shotwell slideshow mode. Adjust the prototype accordingly.
 * 8) * Week 5-7: Integrate the new slideshow mode into showells codebase.
 * 9) * Week 8-9: Bug fixing, writing documentation, testing.
 * 10) I'm sure that I can complete this project because I'm really interested in having this feature in Shotwell. I'm a hobby photographer and so this is one of the things I always miss in comparison with Ligthroom on windows (which I currently use to organize and edit my photos). Furthermore I already worked in some open source projects, like to create cool stuff and have programming practice.

Me and the community

 * 1) impact on the community
 * 2) * Fedora would gain an improved default photo managment software. The improved slideshow mode will give users the opportunity to display their photos in a great way.
 * 3) * Shotwell slideshows today are primitive indeed: Shotwell simply displays one photo after another. We'd like to improve slideshows in many ways. (from shotwell idea page)
 * 4) I'm programming and active in the open source world for some years now. Whenever I had a porblem I couldn't solve with provided docs I always got support by developers or nice peolpe on irc channels. Because of this I think that there're always interested people around to discuss problems.
 * 5) Beneath blogging I want to give others the chance to look at my code (for example setting up a public git tree). Furthermore I would want to create videos showing my progress by recording the desktop.

Miscellaneous

 * 1) I already used vala and so know how to setup the working environment after having updated to Fedora 13. I only contacted my mentor via mail.
 * 2) My shirt size is M (European)
 * 3) Starting in middle of juli the examinations of this semsters start. I won't have as much time as in june but am still sure that I can complete the project.