Students presentation

[Stéphane Maniaci <stephane maniaci gmail com>]

Le mardi 27 avril 2010 à 12:00 +0000, gnome-soc-list-request gnome org a
écrit :
> To begin things, it would be great that you send to this list an
> introduction mail so that the whole community knows about you, your
> project, your plans, etc. 

Well, here I go.

My name is Stéphane Maniaci, I'm a french, 19 year-old student (I turn
20 in July) finishing his DUT (US : associate degree, UK : higher
national diploma, other : I don't know, but it's cool) in Computer
Sciences in Montpellier.

My proposal is about building and delivering a nice and clean
presentation authoring tool (à la Powerpoint or Impress, but we aim at
Keynote) for the GNOME Desktop. All previous projects are inactive or
dead, but two recent projects have started, Glide(C/GTK/Clutter)[1]
which you've seen on planet GNOME, and Ease(Vala/GTK/Clutter), which is
the one I'm going to work on. You might ask "why Ease?" : because I feel
like I can achieve more with Vala and that I can focus more on my
features list than how to write object-oriented C code (note that I
really love programming C, one of my favorite programming language
actually, I just think Vala will make life easier).

My feature list looks like :
- JSON format for storing presentations ;
- Simple effect format (XML/JSon based) ;
- Export plugin (PDF/PNG) ;
- Playback visual tips : chronometer, progress bar, spotlight (as seen
in the cool Impressive project[2] ;
- Other application integration (The GIMP/Inkscape/PiTiVi/Jokosher) ;
- Online stock image fetcher : getting free, unrestricted and cool stock
images from online databases.
- Moving to the GNOME infrastructure (GNOME Git, GNOME Bugzilla, GNOME
Live) ;
- Packaging/translating infrastructure ;
- Communication (blogs.gnome.org, projects.gnome.org).

This is my todo list for the summer. Once all of this is packed in a
simple, robust and handy program, eventually we can start thinking about
some more serious features : Telepathy magic (presentation broadcasting,
collaboration, sharing), advanced text-editing widget (should talk to
the GIMP people) and any other cool ideas that might come along the day,
but again, this is the future and not part of my GSoC roadmap.

Last but not least, I'm really excited (and proud) to work for GNOME.
I've also checked the other GNOME GSoC students proposals, and they all
sound pretty cool, quite glad it's all going to land (hopefully) in
GNOME.

That's it for me. If we were supposed to make it short, well I just
wrote a novel, sorry.

Cheers, and great thanks to GNOME for letting me in,

Stéphane.

[1] - Glide :
http://blogs.gnome.org/racarr/2010/04/20/introducing-glide-presentations-for-gnome/
[2] - Ease : http://github.com/NateStedman/Ease 
[3] - Impressive : http://impressive.sourceforge.net/