Introducing Flávio Martins and GDM Composited Bling project / First report

["Flavio Martins" <xhaker gmail com>]

Hi!

First of all, I have to say that I have been concentrating on getting college stuff done.
I am pretty much overwhelmed by the amount of effort it takes to manage 6 different classes in one semester.
Even more so, when over-evaluation causes me to loose the opportunity of attending 
Ubucon Sevilla (just 300-400Km by road from here).
I am pretty sad about it.

My name is Flávio Martins [1], I am a  21 year old guy from Portugal.
I am a Computer Science and Engineering undergraduate at Faculty of Sciences and Technology of New University in Portugal.
This was the first time I applied for Google Summer of Code and got accepted, if only I had applied in the last years!
I have some experience in Open Source development. I started to contribute to and now also manage the project GTKWifi, a wireless connection manager for GNOME (gnome-panel applet). I plan to have a 
GSoC section in my blog [2] soon.

My project is entitled "GDM Composited Bling".
This project aims to make GDM take advantage of accelerated/composited X servers, to bring pleasant and useful effects to the end user.
The main focus of the project is improving the transitions in 
GDM with various configurable effects (i.e. fade between login screen and user's session), but there will be other surprises.
Besides coding in 
GDM, the solution will involve gnome-session hacking too. Still, the solution must, and will, be DE agnostic.

Since my application got accepted I have taken my mentor's (Brian Cameron) lengthy comment in my application as guidance.
Besides
all the care taken by him to make sure I know the corner cases and
think of a solution/implementation that is optimal, he also pointed me
to previous efforts [3].

I would have to say that even though I
have thought about all this, I haven't had the time do document
anything.You might call it in-brain design phase.
The current phase
at my university is not really the best for real progression in the
project. I will try to keep everybody updated when some palpable
work arises.

Regards,
Flávio Martins

[1] https://librarian.launchpad.net/7119098/head_mug.png
[2] 
http://xhaker.wordpress.com
[3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=355190