Idea of my GSoC '09 Project : Making Gnome desktop location aware

[k roy <kroykroy gmail com>]

Hello,

I am Kalpana Roy, final year engineering student from Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad, India. Continuing with the trend of explaining the idea of the project on the mailing list, I am describing my project in this mail. The idea was described on the Gnome list of GS0C ideas site (http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas) as:

Gnome-panel: Location awareness for the clock applet

Benefits: Lets users get the local time and the right timezone, automatically. Maybe also allow selection of locations from an interactive map.

Requirements: Some experience with C and maybe dbus would be helpful.

Resources:  http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue
                  http://blog.pierlux.com/projects/libchamplain/en/
                  http://nzjrs.github.com/osm-gps-map/
Jussi Kukkonen jku o-hand com has a basic implementation of this already, GSoC could be to clean it up and integrate.

I discussed about the afore-mentioned idea on the #geoclue channel on freenode. Henri Bergius (http://bergie.iki.fi/blog) helped me improve the idea to include the following points:

• Changing the clock time zone based on location (Jussi already has a patch for this that needs to be cleaned up and submitted)
• Changing weather applet to show weather for current location
• Telling Tracker about the location where documents were edited so you can ask "give me the documents I edited in Stockholm"
• Making Gwibber send the current location to microblogging services that support it
• Showing where your Evolution contacts are (and what their local time is), based on Empathy's XMPP location support
• Setting instant messaging availability status based on location ("set my work account as offline when I'm home")
• Clock can not only automatically update the time & weather settings but also display the appointments specific to a location.

More about the project idea can be found at  http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/making_the_gnome_desktop_location-aware/ , http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/making_the_gnome_desktop_location-aware/ & http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dd4m6zsj_5z2jbjqc9&skipauth=true&ncl=true (which contains snapshot of the demo code built by Jussi).

I have not yet decided as to which of the features will/can be implemented within the time-period of GSoC but I feel that inclusion of GeoClue into Gnome desktop will make it more smart and give the users an ease of use, automating simple day-to-day tasks without worrying about them. I would like to seek advice from all those who are interested, regarding how to implement the project, any modifications or any general comment.

Thanking you,
~kr0y. 



-- 
~ Once you have flown, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return --Da Vinci