Re: [GSOC] Spicing up Cheese

["Jaap A. Haitsma" <jaap haitsma org>]

Hi,

As the plan according to [2] is that Cheese will move for a large part
to vala I would suggest using Vala instead of python for the plugins,
because
1) Less memory usage
2) Introducing another programming language makes contributing to
Cheese more difficult because you need to know more programming
languages

According to [2] libcheese will still be in C. Why not do this in
vala. The end result is a C gobject library anyway

Jaap

On Sun, Apr 4, 2010 at 22:50, Yuvi Panda <yuvipanda gmail com> wrote:
> Hi, my name is Yuvi and I'm a student from Chennai, India. I'm
> applying for this year's GSoC to work on GNOME - specifically on
> Cheese. I've been hanging out on IRC talking with @fargiolas and
> @kaserf - and though my proposal isn't ready yet I'm putting up my
> ideas in the mailing list informally.
>
> ==============
> Spicing up Cheese
> ==============
>
> Goals of the project
> ----------------------------
>
> The goal of the project is to make Cheese extremely slick and a lot
> more fun - and in the process (quoting jwz) increases the chances of
> me (or in general users of cheese) getting laid[1]. This involves:
>
> 1. Live Preview of Available Effects.
> 2. Background Changing/Manipulation
> 3. One Click Upload to Facebook/Myspace/etc.
>
> 1. Live Preview of Effects
> ------------------------------------
> See how each effect looks when applied to your face. Much more fun
> than looking at static yellow smileys.
>
> Implementation: Will be following the obvious method of downscaling
> the video, then splitting the pipeline into several parallel parts
> that each apply a different effect and output to a different area on
> the screen. Combinations of Effects can be shown by an extra element
> that appears only when more than one element is selected.
>
> 2. Background Changing/Manipulation
> -------------------------------------------------------
> 90% of all photo manipulation requests I get is for background changes
> (the rest is for removing zits). Completely ignoring the small sample
> space and extrapolating, I can boldly predict that the usage/fun
> factor of Cheese will increase by quite a bit if we had the ability to
> dynamically change the background in a picture/video (in a similar way
> to how Apple does it).
>
> Implementation: The user will be instructed on the backgrounds easiest
> to change (no moving objects, colors not in your clothing, etc) and
> then asked to step away from the webcam while the application takes
> sample pictures of the background. Then we 'diff' the source image
> (from the camera) with the background image to remove the background
> and substitute the user selected background.
>
> 3. One Click Uploads
> -------------------------------
> Most photographs/videos taken by cheese will end up on some form of
> Social Networking sites (5 of the 6 use cases at the Cheese Wiki point
> to Social Networking uses [2]). We should feature improved, 'one
> click' uploading to those sites - while making sure we don't step on
> F-Spot's shoes by trying to become a full fledged photo management
> app. Having a workflow where the user can go from nothing to
> photo-on-facebook in 2 clicks minimum (take snapshot + publish to
> facebook) is a wonderful thing, I'd say.
>
> Implementation: PLUGINS! Preferably of the no-compilation required variety.
>
> Technical Details
> -------------------------
> As suggested on the GSoC ideas page, I'll move the 'glue' code to
> Python (since I have more experience with python than Vala - though
> Vala would be pretty easy to pick up too since I've 2 years of C#
> experience). I'll also converts parts of the UI to libclutter as and
> when required (the camera 'viewfinder' area probably first, menus
> perhaps quite a bit later on, etc). Anything that will cause
> unacceptable performance on the user's computer will be disabled at
> runtime and a message displayed as to why they are grayed out.
>
> Note
> -------
> This is an informal post to the mailing list - and that is all. I'm
> still workin on my application. Feedback? Flames?
>
> [1]: http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html
> [2]: http://live.gnome.org/Cheese/ThreeZero
> --
> Yuvi Panda T
> http://yuvi.in/blog
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>