RSS Screensaver for GSoC

[Neil Loknath <neil loknath gmail com>]

Hi all,

 I've got a cool
idea for a new screensaver I'd like to propose for GSoC.  Here is the
gist of it:

- something similar to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMqEe6g7SWY (Apple RSS visualizer)
- use OPML doc (can export from Google Reader) as source of feeds

- use Glib-RSS or feedparser libraries for handling feed parsing
- create a new screensaver using xscreensaver FlipText as reference (of course, other cool effects are possible..Clutter is awesome at this)
- use OpenGL, and maybe Clutter or Cairo for some cool saver effects! (leaning towards Clutter, as it already depends on OpenGL)
-
the feeds will be assigned to a number key so that when they fly across
the screen you can press a number key to jump to the feed and stop the
saver.

In addition, I think it would be really cool if we could interface
with D-Bus, as media players like Banshee export interfaces for
determining the current playing track. Then we could add news on the
artist currently playing!  Using http://news.google.ca/news?um=1&ned=ca&hl=en&q=rihanna&output=rss, where rihanna is the artist.  Could even expand this to news local to where you're currently at, etc.

Any thoughts? Would be great to discuss with some potential mentor(s) before submitting my proposal.

I
appreciate you taking the time to read this.  Looking forward to
your comments.  Also, here is a thread of some previous discussion: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-January/msg00339.html

Thanks,
Neil