Google Summer of Code 2010 Interest

[Mark Doliner]

On Wed, Mar 24, 2010 at 5:51 PM, Tommy MacWilliam
<tmacwilliam at college.harvard.edu> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> My name is Tommy MacWilliam, and I'm a freshman computer science major at
> Harvard University.  I live just outside Boston, and play guitar and
> practice martial arts in my free time.  I'm interested in participating in
> Google Summer of Code this year, and I'd love to contribute to my favorite
> instant messaging client.
>
> A few of the ideas on Pidgin's FutureSOCProjects jumped out at me, and I was
> hoping to get some feedback on a couple of concept ideas I had.
>
> I found the SMS protocol plugin most interesting, as my final project for my
> programming class last semester was a web service that allowed users to
> access their email from non-smartphones through text messaging.  My idea for
> Pidgin would allow users to add their mobile phone number (specifying
> carrier) as an account and store phone numbers along with contact
> information.  That way, the user would be able to send an SMS message to one
> of their contacts from the same conversation window used by other protocols,
> with messages longer than 160 characters being split up over multiple text
> messages.  Something like libcurl could be used to send a request to a
> script on the Pidgin server containing the user's mobile phone number,
> intended recipient, and message.  The script would then forward the user's
> message to the recipient's mobile device by sending an email to a
> carrier-specific address (i.e. number at vtext.com for Verizon cell phones).
> The message would also include the phone number to which the recipient
> should reply, as responses to the SMS should be sent to the user's mobile
> device, and would not appear in the conversation window (and a message
> stating this fact would be displayed after each send).
>
> I would also be interested in improving the chat log feature (as a separate
> project of course).  Rather than right-clicking a contact and selecting
> "view log", a centralized log viewing window would be created, where logs
> are arranged in a tree by date.  Expanding a given date would show a list of
> all the contacts the user had a conversation with that day, and clicking on
> a specific contact would bring up the appropriate chat log.  The user would
> also be able to search the logs by contact and date as well as the contents
> of the logs themselves.
>
> Please let me know if either of these ideas seems feasible and worth
> implementing, as well as any suggestions you may have for me.
>
> Thanks so much, and I look forward to communicating with you.

Hi Tommy.  I don't have much to contribute, but I suspect there is
more interest from Pidgin developers in the chat log viewer.

Other features that might be nice:
* If the tree could also be arranged by buddies, then expanding a
buddy would show a list of dates for which there are saved logs.
* Ability to delete logs from the viewer.  Both individual
conversations, or all logs for a user on a given day, or maybe all
logs for all users on a given day, or all logs for all users on all
days.

--Mark