Things to do in Gnome 2.X

If you are interested in working on any of these projects, please do mail me - I'd be most happy to help, I'm dead short of time myself.

• Fun desktop hacks

• Standardise selection of up-load sites (webdav://, ssh:// etc.) & have a centralised configuration somewhere, add a 'SendTo' target set in Nautilus & integrate it with the various blog applets.
• Cairo/CORBA integrated remote desktop-embedded monitors; re-write of the gDesklets thing.
• Backup settings - configure other machines to synchronise bits to, when to do that etc.

Open Office

• We need to optimise the a11y code, to talk directly to at-spi-registry instead of proxying to Java and then to the Java bridge to at-spi. Should be fairly easy with UNO's IIOP support.
• Christmas/Greeting card support in OO.o - slightly modified 'draw' shell with suitable clip-art.

• ORBit2 / Bonobo / Activation

  • Hack up a little script that we can install that will allow arbitrary CORBA method invocation on remote objects, and print the output; essentially an abstration of the current 'trace' code to make it more re-usable. It'd allow the "No CORBA / dependencies" philistines to do useful things still.
  • Asynchronous interface stuff, there is apparently a new OMG spec for this - we need to write a bit more ORB code to support async impl.s and to make the current async client stuff 'standard'. Possibly we also need to busk a C mapping for it.
  • Improve efficiency - there are a number of easy wins in the ORB core that would be nice to get to, see ORBit2/TODO.
  • Test bonobo-activation parsing using GMarkup instead of libxml2 - the profiles show big startup time hotspots in libxml2 parsing, see if GMarkup makes any difference.
  • Create an API to serialize live CORBA connection state to a file, and bring it back safely; so we can share the gconfd code that does this in b-a-s.
  • Hack ORBit2 to flush all it's buffers on shutdown so we don't loose any asynchronous calls queued there, enable libbonobo async unrefs.
  • Write a small pre-processor built into libIDL so we don't have endless problems with various platform's cpp's.
  • ORBIT_DEBUG=trace: should dump app-name:PID instead of just PID.
  • Make ORBit2 accept NULL CORBA_Environments everywhere silently, make it return zero'd (defined) values for everything too.

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• Gnome-vfs

  • Gnutella gnome-vfs module, so you can browse the local area, in glorious technicolour in nautilus, and transfer files, etc.
  • Enable .tar.gz / .zip handling code as part of the VFS daemon, allowing shared caching etc.

• A11y

  • Add a report generation mode to at-poke, such that it will analyse applications for accessibility, and detect inconsistancy / lack of conformity.

• Evolution

  • Fix addressbook view so it shows your home address if you have no business address, properly, always in the minicard view.
  • Scan mail for the string 'attached', and if present ask to confirm mail sending, if nothing is attached. [ localizing this is harder ].
  • In calendar - month view, scan the start of an appointment title for a time, or time range.
  • Associations between calendar events, mail messages and contacts.

• Nautilus

  • Make the location bar auto-completion scroll the main pane when you've sub-filtered the selection.
  • Filtering in the nautilus location bar; '*.txt'.
  • Shell mode, where we split the icon / list view and whack a shell in the bottom [ whose cwd synchronises with the location (?)].
  • When nautilus notices a CD - if it's an audio one, still add a desktop icon that when clicked launches gnome-cd appropriately.

• Misc. desktop

  • Add native printing support to gnome-terminal, so we can print either the selection, or the screen as plain text via gnome-print.
  • Add a --transient-parent=XWindowId option to libgnome, so that when we fork eg. control center bits, we can center them on the main nautilus process that activates them, instead of the WM's random mess.
  • D&D printing
    • a Printer icon on the desktop, that we can drag documents to and they print.
    • Tough to do initially, but we could add CORBA interfaces to things like gnumeric to make it work smoothly.
    • Also useful for batch / automated printing, need a shell scriptable interface.
    • Pleases RMS, who wants this - make that man's day.
    • Something functional but incomplete is ok, better to be easy for txt, ps, pdf than tough for everything.
  • IPP integration / GUI plugged into Gnome-print, apparently CUPS is not the way to go.
  • Write an import script for Qt Designer people, so we can import their files into glade-2.
  • Port pfaedit to gtk+, and make it prettier.
  • Add a 'sync-background' mode to the panel, and a 'backround' property on control applets, to make 'transparency' more appealing.