Improved desktop notifications and a Wayland-compatible battery testing tool are among the 14 projects selected by GNOME for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC).
The yearly, three month long initiative from Google is a mainstay of the free software calendar. Under the guidance of community-based mentors students get paid to work on achievable and practical efforts that benefit users within the open source sphere.
The aim of GSoC is as much about each student learning, maturing and developing their software development skills as it is delivering a ‘tangible’ result at the end of the process.
Projects chosen for the initiative also need to meet a certain set of criteria, and be achievable within the time frame — hence no pie-in-the-sky “build a free and open source 1:1 clone of Adobe Photoshop CC in GTK” type wishes!
GNOME’s GSoC 2020 Projects
GNOME, like many free software projects, takes part every year. And this year its range of projects is as diverse as ever.
The official GNOME website could do with some TLC, couldn’t it? Intern Clarissa Borges will undertake work in this area. Her brief states she’ll be performing ‘technical and content-wise evaluation’ of the existing GNOME website with a view towards a potential/eventual refresh.
Mariana Pícolo is tackling a redesign of notification popovers in GNOME Shell. The effort hopes to introduce “…a cleaner design for the notifications panel, with some improvements on the design itself, and the popovers will have some actions on it.”
José F Lorenzo-Hernández is to work on Wayland port of Battery Bench. This may also include adding new benchmarks and tests to the tool to make it easier for developers to record and track battery and energy consumption under Wayland.
Other projects include “UI design improvements” in Epiphany, specifically to the Preferences and History dialogs, and the Bookmarks popover; multi-account support in Fractal; and an adaptive (read: mobile friendly) sound recorder redesign.
GNOME Music matures with each release but, in a world of cloud-centric music streaming, its local-file focus puts it at a slight disadvantage. The solution: make it find and play music from remote sources “with almost zero configuration and user efforts”.
You can read through all of the selected projects for GNOME on the official GSoC website, where you can find a full list of organisations, mentors, and projects.