The Google Summer of Code 2011 has been launched. The Mozilla Project has had the honour of participating in every SoC so far, and intends to submit a request to take part again. This means we need to produce a list of suitable student projects in the next four weeks.
We are collecting ideas for every part of the project – Firefox, Thunderbird, Camino, Seamonkey, Bugzilla, L10n, NSS, Drumbeat and many more. If you have a proposal, head over to the Brainstorming page. Please read the instructions at the top – following them vastly increases your chances of your idea getting added to the formal Ideas page.
Note that, in order to have much chance of going ahead, ideas need to have a suitable mentor. So if you submit an idea and you aren’t available to or suitable to mentor it, you may want to go about trying to find one by politely emailing experienced hackers in the appropriate areas of the code.
I would love to see someone working on interoperability of Thunderbird/Lightning and MS Exchange. Most logically through the implementation of the OpenChange work. http://www.openchange.org.
Two-way synchronization of e-mail, calendar, task, and contact data would be fantastic.
Thank you for your time,
Mike
Better tab support in SeaMonkey. Should be closer to the way Firefox handles tabs. Too cumbersome.
Could a student make an HTML-editor for mobile phones?
Then you can edit your web pages on the go.
At bugzilla.mozilla.com bug 635774 is a request for Seamonkey on mobile phones, like Firefox on mobile phones. Seamonkey contains a built-in WYSIWYG html-editor. Making this for mobile phones is too much to be asked from a student in a summer school, but if one could make a cross-platform text HTML-editor, it would be already great. If a student could make anything cross-platform for mobiles it would already be great.
There are two small features which would be nice in Thunderbird. It is possible that they exist and I don’t know how to turn them on. When composing, whether it be a new email, a reply, a forward, or an edit as new, it would be nice to be able to switch from Plain Text to HTML mode or the other way. MS Outlook supports with this under the “Format” pull down and I find it quite useful.
Secondly: Long ago, back in the days of text only email, there was an email client name “Elm”. One of the things you could do with a received email was to “Bounce” it. It would return to sender with the headers looking like a bounce because of “No Such User”. I miss this in the modern email clients.
I believe both of these would be small enough to be suitable for students. Unfortunately, I do not have adequate knowledge of Thunderbird internals do the mentoring myself.
Linux Caller ID program.
Would be able interface with a modem either internal or external that used CID information. The software can audibly announce callers, use a adjustable form size & font. Record callers phone numbers in a phone log with the date and time and total the number of times this number called. Right click to add phone numbers to personal phone book. Where we can have the ability to associate custom sounds with callers. Other features could be to block/ignore/prioritise predefined numbers. Use a time to sleep function and a manual on/off switch. Also a search function.
I believe this would be very useful software and be a good learning opportunity for programmers.