Introduction and some project ideas / questions :)

[Dylan McCall]

On Sun, Mar 21, 2010 at 6:43 PM, Dylan McCall <dylanmccall at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody!
>
> My name is Dylan McCall. I'm a student at Simon Fraser University in
> Canada, and I have been using Ubuntu for a long time. (And if my name
> sounds familiar, I'm on the planet and I'm maintaining the project which
> makes the little slideshow that plays when you install Ubuntu).
>
> Feeling very confident about my abilities, I hope to participate in GSoC
> this year so that I can spend my summer doing something productive and
> awesome :)
>
> Now, I have a big list of things I want to do, so I need to edit it down
> to one or two really fantastic proposals...
>
>      * So, I have one thought that came far out of left field: a robot
>        programming game. Yes, all these practical project ideas and I
>        want to make a _game_ for GSoC. Please, though, hear me out! A
>        big effort that's going on in Ubuntu right now is appealing to
>        opportunistic developers. Another step there, in my view, is to
>        make it exciting for people who are learning programming on this
>        platform. Some nice design and online goodies could do just what
>        we want.Naturally, this is a bit
>
>

Eep! That is embarrassing. I managed to hit Ctrl+Enter somehow,
sending the message way before I finished. These fast Internet
connections are nothing but trouble!

Err, where was I? Um... naturally, that game idea is a bit different
from the other stuff, but I think it fits into the Ubuntu project
specifically with the opportunistic programmer stuff we have going on.
Quickly is totally appealing to someone who knows programming, but a
programming game aiming at beginner Python users and sharing
conventions with the GNOME environment might be a good way to get
people started. I would be interested to know if there's a fit for
such things in Ubuntu's GSoc and if anyone might be interested in
mentoring that :)

I'm also interested in the sound theme creator idea. One thing isn't
entirely clear to me, though: are you picturing a completely separate
sound theme creator, or something still integrated with the Sound
Preferences? My thought there would be to take cues from the current
Appearance Preferences. Sound themes are similar in design and
behaviour to icon themes, except that users are more prone to not want
sounds on certain events.


Well, that's my babbling for now.

Thanks!
Dylan