Summer of Code 2008: 21 potential projects

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:

  1. 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. 🙂
  2. Tweak Google Browser Sync to synchronize user-defined spelling dictionaries between computers.
  3. 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.
  4. Better tools to reverse engineer USB devices so that they can work on Linux in user space.
  5. 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.
  6. Better screencasting support for Linux. Windows has Camtasia and CamStudio. The tools on Linux just aren’t as polished.
  7. Better video editing software in Linux. Or get parts of GIMPshop into the GIMP.
  8. Better podcasting support in Audacity.
  9. 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. 🙂
  10. A simple tool to backup your entire Google account (email, calendar, docs, feeds, etc.).
  11. Work to make Ubuntu more suitable for the coming wave of computers with Linux pre-installed (Wal-mart PC, Asus EEE).
  12. The world always needs better, more streamlined virtualization.
  13. Beef up the features on brainstorm.ubuntu.com . For example, let each user see all the ideas that they’ve voted for.
  14. Help out on Google Gears or Android.
  15. Make Juice run better on Linux.
  16. Make Asterisk easier to install and configure.
  17. Implement the functionality of the dragdropupload extension directly into Firefox.
  18. Add the ability to drag/drop images in WordPress, and let WordPress handle uploading the image to a preferred location on your webhost.
  19. Make the standard version of Ubuntu boot even faster.
  20. Add some nice features to Wine, ReactOS or Abiword.
  21. 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?

60 Responses to Summer of Code 2008: 21 potential projects (Leave a comment)

  1. 9. # 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. 🙂

    That would be a great one!

  2. The real sad thing about this is that it is being limited to students.

    To thrive in the 21st century, society has to abandon this obsessive mindset about classifying or categorizing other Humans. 😐

    Open it up to all human beings who can contribute – whether they are between jobs or recently retired or recent grads

    Creativity and intelligence knows no social category – however, innovation can live on for generations.

    Set creativity free – welcome it from anyone who wants to share.

  3. I love the late Sunday night posting! I even beat SEW to the punch on commenting.

    I just got through writing up specifications of a software I want created that I sent off to a coder in England, so your question is well timed!

    You alluded to a similar e-mail program in a recent post.

    My dream would be an E-Mail console where you could do the following,

    – assign tags to each user
    – identify a user by their main e-mail but be identified by all their emails.
    – write rules where e-mails coming could be identified by their being a first time e-mailer, or a repeater.
    – Set up certain auto-responder features for certain criteria
    – Be able to tag people simply in order of importance of how quick you see their e-mail.
    – Be able to have these tags be applied based on rules the user wrote, or manually set by a user.
    – Have the software recommend a reply to certain types of e-mails, that shows up on an editable screen that can either just be sent, or can be edited.

    In one account we get around 100 e-mails a day and would love to be able to effectively and with politeness handle each of them appropriately.

    My second request would be to have Longmans Dictionary with derivations easily loaded onto my Blackberry. I heard a rumor that Google is coming out with a phone OS this summer. If that is true, then I wold like it to work on my GoogleBerry.

    That is my summer Christmas list!

    dk

  4. Damn! I typed too slow and SEW beat me! Arghhhhh the humanity!
    dk

  5. Synergy is an excellent product… It also does not work properly with KDE4, and it’s got a lot of bugs on Windows Vista. Both of those would be great to see.

    I just wish I could drag a window from my Windows box and have it show up on the monitor of my linux box, and the other way around.

  6. #9 1st part “report a spam webpage” How do you report it to Google?
    #9 2nd part “Report as Spam!” (the form at http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html) is easy.

  7. I would love, love, love it if #2 – Tweak Google Browser Sync to synchronize user-defined spelling dictionaries between computers – were done. It’s not as grandiose as some of the other ideas, but if accomplished, would make my web life that much easier.

  8. Is there a manually way to do #9? I’ve wanted to report a few splogs I’ve found, but was too lazy to search where/how I could submit it to Google.

  9. How about a project to overhaul Google Browser Sync and make it work properly, plus add compatibility for Firefox 3?

    While we’re on the subject of Google Firefox extensions, how about other projects to update the Google Toolbar (missing features of the IE toolbar version 5) and Blogger Web Comments (doesn’t work with new Google Account logins)?

    You ask, I answer. 🙂

  10. I would love to see a WordPress plugin which can do the job of automatic plugin(s) upgrade for me. With the frequency of plugin update quite high, it becomes quite difficult to keep track.

    There are plugins(and even some hosts provide 1 click install) available for wordpress upgrade but I don’t see any plugins “for upgrade of plugins”

  11. From your list, I think #10 is not only a great idea for the summer of code, but also for Google as a main project. I would love to trust all my data to Google, but not having my own copy… it’s not cool.

  12. I’d like to see a Firefox extension that turns any text input into a command line. Hitting a special key combination would enable the command line, after which I could run any number of commands: file system commands, address book fetching commands, mapping commands, definitions, etc.

    Command return values (if any) would appear in the text input field. Commands could be created by the community and users would add commands to their account and personalize if required.

    If the current site doesn’t have any input boxes, then one of the browser’s input fields (address bar, search bar) could be made to respond to the key combination.

    Examples:
    1) I want to add the HTML for an image to my blog, so I run the “flickr snowflake” command which pops up a window with the search results. After clicking on the photo I want, the appropriate “img” tag is added where my cursor is.

    2) I want to send an article to my friend using a website’s “send this to a friend” link. I can’t remember his email so I run the “get_email john smith” command which returns John’s email.

    3) I need a synonym so I write “syn foreign” and choose from a list.

    etc etc

  13. I totally agree with martinsc, #9 would be a great one! It would be even better if results that you mark as spam don’t show up after that, I really hate seeing spam whilst searching!

    If it were up to me though, I’d have someone devote all his (or her) time to coming up with a system to fight spam on blogger.com … in the last couple of days I have had several spam e-mails containing links to blogger.com blogs sneak straight through my greylisting, blacklisting and spamassassin anti-spam measures. The spammers have disabled the ‘Flag’ button in the toolbar and almost instantly redirect you to some viagra buying site… highly annoying.

    Examples of blogger subdomains with such activity are rnaf17pmclm0u, duk8rz1u82xvdk, ox1ln2qxdv0pyz, jpsxqshy09zi8zq, cqsb2wsi8tqf7 (.blogger.com).

    Before you ask: I have already submit all of the urls via the report spam page and yes, this comment is indeed intended as a hint that you should mentor your friends and blogger and perhaps share some of your wisdom with them 😉

  14. a version of Unbuntu better suited to running on systems that use flash as oposed to traditional DASD.

    Making the “server” install of ubunto a proper server install maybe witrh a switch for dev/test and live server installs with better defaults.

    and a better way to configure MYSQL security for some of the standard cases ditto for X as well.

  15. #3 – better Google supported Open ID

  16. A nice project for Synergy would be to see if were possible to pipe the sound from the client to the server machine some how. There are several requests for this on their forums actually. It would be totally awesome if someone actually did it. 🙂

  17. * Better wireless card support in Linux.
    * Automatix-like tool integrated in Ubuntu.

  18. I really like your suggestions, Matt — particularly: #4, #6, #7, #10, #11and #13. Thanks.

  19. I have always wanted a plugin for FF that would allow me to delete specific URL’s from my history without damaging the rest of the history. This would help in production to make sure I am looking at a non-cached version of the site.

  20. S.E.W., people who are not students can still participate in open-source, of course. But students often have that free-time over the summer and benefit from seeing different approaches to software development early in their career.

    Voyagerfan5761, I’d support those. 🙂 I’d love if the Firefox toolbar allowed custom buttons, for example.

    Maurice, I like the “better Ubuntu on Flash” idea. I think Solid-State Disk (SSD) hard drives may start to appear faster than people expect, too. And of course, the ability to load the whole operating system into RAM would be neat.

    Richard and seth, I like those ideas too. Maybe some students will read this thread. If a student wanted to work on something on Google’s end, they might do better as a summer intern. But if it doesn’t require access to Google’s code, a Summer of Code provides a great way to work on things.

  21. Methodtim and John Lynn, it’s a little off-topic, but here’s how to report webspam to Google:
    – If you have a Google Account, the best form to use is https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en . You can change “en” to lots of other languages as well.
    – If you don’t have a Google Account, you can use http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

    The form that is authenticated with a Google Account gets a little more weight in our process. We can’t guarantee that we act on every single report individually, but we do act on quite a few of them. We also use the spam reports that we get to help us prioritize which algorithmic projects to work on in the future.

  22. S.E.W., people who are not students can still participate in open-source, of course. But students often have that free-time over the summer and benefit from seeing different approaches to software development early in their career.

    Sometimes it is IMPOSSIBLE to get thru to you!!!!
    Recent grads, recent retirees, those between careers ALSO can benefit from seeing different approaches to software development. And ALSO have free time.

    Perhaps, the recent grad or the unemployed will use this knowlege during their next jobs. The retiree may become a consultant.

    You MUST allow EVERY Human being to participate in this program and any other programs that Google sponsors – WithOUT regard to their status.

    Let the Brain be the only thing that you are concerned about – no the body that houses it!

  23. Wouldn’t “Google Browser Sync” have to be open sourced in order to qualify as a project for SoC?

  24. Regarding item #21: Check out Alexandria (http://alexandria.rubyforge.org/). It’s stable, easy to install and use, and allows you to export your library data for use elsewhere.

    I used this for some time . . . until I bought a Mac 🙂

  25. Fix it so wikipedia doesn’t come up as the top result of 90% of the searches people do. I mean really how can you “trust” someone who comes out and says we don’t hold out pages to the level of being truthful.

  26. I would love for people (Too advanced for me) To work on a WordPress plug-in that works similar to the drop down ‘add-this’ social bookmark widget. I don’t mind the ‘add this’ one, but I would prefer simple logo’s neatly laid out across the bottom of each post.

    I have seen examples of this on WordPress Blogs, but they all look like they were done by the developers of that particular site.

    Also it would be nice to see some e-commerce open source software coming into the light.

  27. A Firebug extension that doesn’t crash Gmail!

  28. Hello,

    Your blog is my favourite reading. Nice thoughts.

    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. 🙂

    This would be rather useless as Google does not seems to read those reports ever. I’ve fired several of those but no action has been taken ever. And, Matt, if you would read comments on some of your older posts (have spent a month or so doing that) than you would know, that I’m not alone. So buttons of that kind will remain useless if Google will answer only 1 out of 200-1000 inquiries, requests & reports. Yahoo deals much better with this. Has Google become too big?

  29. I would like to see the Twitter and Pownce APIs integrated directly into Pidgin. They already have basically every IM provider accounted for, I’d like direct API integration instead of having to Twitter via gTalk using Pidgin. The less apps I have to run, the better.

  30. Improve AdWords Editor. Make the code faster so the info you want just snaps up.

    Improve the AdWords “Snapshot” to include bar charts, number of conversions, features advanced AdWords users request.

  31. David Jacques-Louis, we do have to prioritize outside reports together with the stuff that we identify and surface internally as well. That’s fair feedback though, and we’ll do some thinking about whether it’s possible to show more about all the ways that we do take action on outside reports. I’m not sure we’ll be able to come up with something, but we’ll put some thought into it.

    Shawn K, good suggestion.

  32. I would like easy synchronization between Google Calendar and Linux (Kontact, Evolution) and PalmOS/PocketPC.
    Actually, I own a PalmOS device, so that’s really what *I* want, but PocketPC users shouldn’t be deprived of that possibility (then, as far as I know, they may have a way of doing it already).

    Pretty please 😀 😉

  33. #6 – Camtasia, CamStudio -like for Linux: http://recordmydesktop.iovar.org/

  34. I just want to see one thing, although I’m not sure it’s an open source thing…a forum plugin/addon that will detect and block cross-posted forum spam.

    There’s nothing worse than seeing things like [url=http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLL,GGLL:2008-07,GGLL:en&q=You%27ve+read+their+books.+Now+you%27re+ready+for+more.+Come+and+join+the+conversation+at+the+Voices+that+Matter%3a+Web+Design+Conference+coming+to+the+Loews+Vanderbilt+in+Nashville+this+June%21+You%e2%80%99ll+learn+from+and+mingle+with+the+industry%e2%80%99s+most+respected+authors+and+meet+peers+from+all+over+the+globe+who+are+passionate+about+Web+design%21]this[/url] on a daily basis, in some cases more than once daily.

  35. Inkscape: I’d like to see more file formats supported for import and export plus improvements in some of the existing exports like EPS.

    CamStudio: An awesome OS screencast capturing program for Windows. Like to see it ported to Mac and Linux.

    Open Clip Art Library: They REALLY need a dedicated programmer to do some code clean-up and some tweaks to CCHost so they can get a better search function and show thumbnails of the images.

  36. No offense to Google, but I’d like a “Submit Spam” button to report to as many search engines as possible, including Yahoo!, Ask, etc. I want to Help Improve The Internet, rather than just helping Google — though, Google, I *do* love you!

    And, a way to backup all your Google account info — especially Gmail — would be ROCKING! Open source too is important, did you guys see the story about G-Archiver? :S

  37. Matt, Can’t you use Google Books to keep track of your book library at home? You can add books that you own to the ‘my library’ list and then export that as an xml file and they have RSS feeds.

  38. 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.

    I believe the more efficient and proper solution would be for Google to fully embrace OpenID. The steps taken so far are encouraging of course, but if you want to be able to use a Google account login on site X when site X already supports OpenID, it makes little sense to create a new plugin to do that, rather than taking advantage of an existing distributed login infrastructure.

    That is unless WordPress is so far behind the times that it doesn’t support OpenID yet. Is that the case? I know that Moveabletype fully supports OpenID on both ends and that TypeKey, a bit of a competitor with OpenID, can actually be used as an OpenID in and of itself.

    In that case, spending time on getting WP to support OpenID would be of great benefit to the blogging communities.

    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.

    Sounds like it could be done in an hour or so, probably less, but ripe for abuse. Does Google really want the extra work that would surely come from people intentionally submitting false reports? How would you be able to block them, coming from unauthenticated sources?

    Help out on Google Gears or Android.

    Not the most intuitive thing in the world, Gears. Implementing it for your own purposes is nifty, but what I’d find far more interesting is opening Gears up such that you can tinker with it on sites where it’s already implemented, but not under your control. Think of how you can easily modify any Greasemonkey script you’ve come across, but would like slightly different behavior from.

    Can’t make on-the-fly changes like that when Gears is already out there. My example would be how Gears for Google Reader doesn’t discriminate against read and unread feed items when syncing for offline use. I typically see barely 10-20% of my unread items synced before reaching the limit of 2,000 items. As a blogger, I track over 100 feeds which nearly 1,000 or more new items per day. When Gears has a limit of 2,000 feed items, and I’ve got 500 unread items, I expect to have all 500 unread items synced first, rather than seeing barely 50 or 100 unread items once my connection is gone.

    If Gears operated more like Greasemonkey did, such a chance could undoubtedly be made in a matter of minutes. Unless I’m not understanding how Gears really works…

    What about you? If you could request a student to work on any open-source project this summer, what would you ask for?

    1. Improve the performance of OpenOffice — this should be a top priority and if possible, a specifically sponsored event within SOC.

    2. Improve the build process and lower the build dependencies for either OpenOffice, or Mozilla. Getting a proper development environment setup and then compiling either of these monliths is a total nightmare that should make any open source advocate cringe in horror.

    Microsoft could release Windows Vista under the GPL, and nobody would take a single line of code or make a single new release if building it were as big of a nightmare as either of these programs — and I’m sure it probably already is, but you get my point.

    3. A windows port of MythTV. A year or two ago, a student took up the challenge under the Summer Of Code, and just disappeared completely. It’s an incredible amount of work due to the differences in how video is captured between Win32 and *nix, so I can understand why most people don’t want to bother. It still needs to happen, though.

    4. A script writing program (as in Hollywood screenplays and television scripts) that uses OASIS for document storage. Why not hold their feet to the fire and have them do more than just tinker on an existing code base?

    5. Open Blogger to SOC students that want to hack on it to bring it into competition with other blogging platforms. I firmly believe that there is no reason you can’t have flexibility, stability, and usability all in the same package.

    6. Open Google Earth for SOC students; can’t count the number of times I’ve been forced to use map.google.com because there’s no way to turn off the satellite imagery in Google Earth, to make it easier to work with and use the road mapping system.

    7. Create a plug-in for VLC so that it can read comskip files. Considered doing this myself, but couldn’t even get VLC to compile under msys.

  39. I don’t think Pidgin has AV support. It would be nice to make it more feature rich. People can add plugins/skins for those who want it, and people who like it light-weight, can leave it as is. It can look as nice as Trillian too: http://www.trillian.im/

    #9 is a definite must have!!!

  40. Browser sync isn’t actually eligible for GSOC, as it’s not open source (hint, hint!)

    It’s a shame it’s not getting more love really, I’ve poked around its javascript, and it has what looks like an intended extension interface that nobody has plugged into, as it’s completely undocumented…

  41. publicfacing, I wouldn’t mind if the extension reported spam to Google first and then to the other search engines as well — as long as Google gets the spam report. 🙂

    Hmm. I’ll ask, bd.

    Colin Colehour, it is neat that it Google Books’ “My Books” feature can just take a list of ISBNs and will let you export the list of book. Maybe I’ll have to hook up my CueCat or find another scanner..

    Paul William Tenny, great suggestions. On speeding up OpenOffice: it’s amazing to me how useful of a skill it is to speed up a program, and yet I was never taught those profiling skills in any computer science class that I took.

  42. Hi Matt,

    Just want to hear some update with the google phone…

  43. Paul William Tenny, great suggestions. On speeding up OpenOffice: it’s amazing to me how useful of a skill it is to speed up a program, and yet I was never taught those profiling skills in any computer science class that I took.

    Thanks.

    I learned C with a book called “Learn C in 21 days”, and then learning every line of code from a poorly thought out and badly performing IRC service called Uworld and X2. Those programs mistake’s taught me more about how to improve performance in a couple of weeks — at least when it comes to memory management and large amounts of textual processing — than I have learned in all of the years since. I cannot overstate how quickly I learned these lessons just by looking at an open source program that was an absolute mess, a shining example of What Not To Do.

    Resource conservation with object pools (which at least in any recent JVM isn’t even necessary when talking about Java) is a good habit to pickup as well, but in OO without a garbage collector of any sort, it teaches you to think ahead and anticipate resource allocation, so you can be ready for it when it comes rather than reacting to drastic needs that need to be satisfied *right this second*.

    Without looking at OpenOffice, I can imagine that having something that complex that needs to plug into various windowing systems on different operating systems is going to cost you performance no matter what, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t opportunities to make gains.

    There are always opportunities to make gains. Just adding a rudimentary garbage collector into the mix could give you a boost. I remember reading that experiments with basic garbage collectors showed a speed boost of up to 15-20% even with established, well maintained code, such as with PERL.

    I can imagine the SoC benefiting OpenOffice performance but it’s not going to be fun work. I’m not even willing to waste three hours setting up a proper environment just to get it to compile, much less however long it would take to become familiar with the code, start tuning, then wait half a day for it to compile.

    I don’t envy anyone that tries, but OpenOffice desperately needs the attention. I can think of few SoC projects that the public would benefit more from than this.

    Regardless though, SoC is good on all levels and I’m looking forward to seeing what comes out of it this year.

  44. What I would like to see, related to the webspam report tool, a similar tool but the opposite, a tool used to discover the “Trust Rank” assigned to a given page.

    No?

    Ok, then just about all of the ones you’ve mentioned would be great additions to all of our virtual and real lives as well as being perfect examples of Open Source working as it should as opposed to projects that sometimes become “Open Sores”. 😉

    Here’s an idea, although not very serious, how about a tool that will take the exact number of green pixels in a given page’s toolbar PageRank display and randomize their respective positions across and throughout the toolbar PageRank display. Combine that with removing the ratio display on mouseover and one could make the toolbar less useful for determining PageRank “value” while still making it useful to get a feeling for some level or apparent content “value”.

    Or, break out “Trust Rank” from dev and unleash it! 🙂

    Craig

  45. #10.A simple tool to backup your entire Google account (email, calendar, docs, feeds, etc.).
    I would like to do this ……

  46. #10.A simple tool to backup your entire Google account (email, calendar, docs, feeds, etc.).
    I would like to do this ……

  47. Browser sync isn’t actually eligible for GSOC, as it’s not open source (hint, hint!)

    It’s a shame it’s not getting more love really, I’ve poked around its javascript, and it has what looks like an intended extension interface that nobody has plugged into, as it’s completely undocumented…

    bd_, I talked to one of the developers for Google Browser Sync, and he said that he’d be willing to shave off some time to help a student open-source the client. So if a student wanted to tackle that as a Summer of Code (SOC) project, it could probably happen.

    Be aware that Google Browser Sync consists of a client and a server, and the server would have to be updated as well if there were significant client changes. There’s not really any time budgeted for that at all right now. A potential answer would be to rework the browser sync client so that it depended on some sort of generic server.

  48. Matt, I have a more serious suggestion this time.

    Take bits and pieces from :
    1. Creative Commons;
    2. MPEG-21 Digital item Declaration and various other MPEG-21 parts;
    3. DMP (Digital Media Project).

    Mix together and come up with a service that independent audio artists, and video at some point as well, can use to register a Creative Commons license and along with it, a digital fingerprint that one could easily use to search the database of licenses and signatures to quickly identify not only copyright holder info but just about any other type of media/content type specific information you want from included artists to references to a music video or movies in which the given work is used in.

    Want to change the future of digital media as we know it?

    If this never makes it into an SoC project, which wouldn’t surprise me, anyone interested in working on a project of this type, you can probably figure out how to contact me if so inclined.

    I do think though that something like this would not only be right up Google’s alley but more so, the opportunities for creative diversity that something like this would enable are literally and truly beyond imagination.

    Craig

  49. Cross-browser Google Browser Sync, please 🙂

  50. In Gmail, a conversation is a collection of related emails. I can expand/collapse it, print it, or email it.

    Why not add this functionality to other collections? I.e. a collection of emails with the same label; any search result; recent emails from a contact; etc.

    Right now, I’d like to be able to look at the content of 5 emails (not in the same conversation). I gave them a temporary label, clicked on the new label, and hopefully looked for the expand/collapse, print, email functions.

    Sorry, but I just realized that this doesn’t fall under open source. But to heck with it, I’m going to leave the comment anyhow. 🙂

  51. I’m making a face collage at newphotobooths.com. Just one big page of pics. Could some smart summer-of-code programmers :

    a) create css commands that arrange image files of varying heights and widths with no overlap and no white space. (so I can stop using photoshop for each new addition)
    b) randomize the image placement, so it’s different with each load.
    c) make it load quickly. (of course)

    thanks Matt!
    Jotham

  52. Matt–register my vote for #10. The ability to export any of the data in open formats (XML, CSV, tab-delimited text, etc.) would be great. Calendars can now be synchronized with Outlook, so why not allow a data download?

  53. Jack, many Google services do provide download in portable formats. For example, Google calendar provides an RSS feed which you can then download and save off.

  54. “#10.A simple tool to backup your entire Google account (email, calendar, docs, feeds, etc.).
    I would like to do this ……”

    Arun, the student applications open up on March 24th, I think.

  55. Hi!

    A well documented tool for simple customizing WordPress layout:

    as Fonts and their Dimensions
    Background Colour or Picture
    Positioning of Textframes

    Greetings

    Karl

  56. Thank you very much for this list! I intend on participating in GSoC this year (finally reached the age where I could), and these ideas really got me thinking! I really like your last idea, with the books. I also love your screencasting program suggestion! Linux has a few programs that do this, but they aren’t too good.

  57. Re #21: how about something like Picasa but for books? One can have the collections locally on the computer, but can also upload and share all/some of them online. I really like the sharing concept on http://librarything.com.

  58. Number 11 is, I think, well underway. And it should get some support from OEMs who have a financial stake in it.

    I would really like a port of Sketchup for linux.

    Thanks

    John

  59. >> 9 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.

    Or 9b) A Firefox extension or Greasemonkey to spam reporting webspam to Google. The extension would let you report a spam webpage from a button on a toolbar. Or the automated agent posing as you anyway. The extension would also add a “Report as Spam!” button to Google’s search results page. And then click it over and over, based on the list of competitor URLs in your main d/base

    Sometimes, a lack of user interaction is a good thing…

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