[Banshee-List] A song and dance about GSoC 2012

["gnomeuser gmail com" <gnomeuser gmail com>]

This years Google Summer of Code is about to start so I figured I
would start the traditional thread to throw around ideas for projects.

Banshee community newcomer Udesh has expressed an interest in doing
voice controls for Banshee under GSoC, as this is also work that
relates to his thesis. I feel it would be an important accessibility
enhancement as well as adding much desirable bling to Banshee. He did
GSoC last year for a different project but this still means he is well
aware of the challenges and he has started contributing to Banshee
recently.

I also have a couple of potentially interesting ideas

Porting relevant parts of the Banshee interface to XWT.
https://github.com/mono/xwt

Banshee Community Extensions on Mac + Windows
BCE has a lot of famed and important functionality that is currently
only available to Linux users. It would be nice to have some work put
into making it easy to build and distribute Banshee and BCE on all
platforms

Hardware support on OS X + Windows
Likewise we only have hardware support on Windows, it would be great
if we could offer the same coverage on all our supported platforms.

Giving Booter the boot
sqlite3 shared/concurrent writes
* allow multiple processes
* get rid of Booter
* http://www.sqlite.org/draft/wal.html

Have all been on the wishlist for ages, it might be a good project for
the SQLite savy student.
https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1zYYQTo148TQOFLF2y1IzKSMsLJJTcWJkYhXbZNhVgHs&pli=1

Finishing C removal
Including binding of the needed packages such as webkit, porting
Banshee to use these new bindings, updating unit tests. Biggest part
might be porting the BCE last.fm fingerprinter C#.

Taglib-Sharp, find suitable distributable test files for all formats,
enhance coverage, port Banshee's cd import to use taglib#

Next generation UX
Potentially based on the MeeGo player (needs UX for Video, Podcasts
and Audiobooks). I have promises from Ian Hex (who did the Novacut
identity branding and is doing Elementary OS branding right now) to
work on creating mockups for this. However making them reality would
be fantastic and hopefully a suitable student will be able to take
this on.
see also https://live.gnome.org/action/info/Design/Apps/Music for inspiration.

Some of these are admittedly small and might be able to be combined
into house cleaning tasks, in which there is no shame. Banshee should
be beautiful to look at, even the codebase.

Now of course this means we will also need mentors, poking Olivier
earlier on gtalk he expressed interest in mentoring this year but more
helpful faces would be fantastic.

- David