With Google’s annual Summer of Code very nearly upon on us the list of accepted projects that developers will spend the summer getting paid to work on are all but out. With that in mind I’ve picked a handful of accepted projects that I’m really excited about seeing progress on.

Rhythmbox

Last.fm is a fantastic tool for browsing and listening to music, unfortunately Rhythmbox’s current Last.fm plug-in has an unintuitive user interface. It also uses an old and deprecated API. This project will port the plug-in to use the current API, as well as making the user interface more intuitive and rewarding to use.

This proposal intends to create an open-source implementation of the DACP protocol, aka iPhone/iPod Remote app, as a plugin to the Rhythmbox music player as the "server" and a proof-of-concept GObject-based "client".

Banshee

The Now Playing source is an underutilized component of the Banshee user interface. The goal of this proposal is to extend that interface to be a source for extended information about the currently playing media. After the completion of this project, the Now Playing source will replace (or augment) the current behavior of the Context Pane, but also be extended to account for other media types such as podcasts, videos, audio books, and internet radio.

UbuntuOne

Two projects at GSoC will try to bring the UbuntuOne client to both the KDE desktop and to Google’s mobile operating system Android, with the Android project seeking to: –

…enable Ubuntu users not only to browse files in the cloud from their phone, but also share experience on the spot using URLs to their published U1 resources, instantly upload camera pictures or download music. Eventually, the aim would be to implement full-featured syncdaemon for specific UDFs. Let’s take that cloud mobile!

And don’t forget… 

Organization application Getting things GNOME!  will be rocking out this summer adding integration with online services such as Remember the Milk, Evolution and even Twitter (!).

Article originally appeared on omgubuntu.co.uk