My Google Sommer of Code Project

[Mark Doliner]

On Sat, Apr 3, 2010 at 11:43 AM, Ali Albazaz <me at melixer.de> wrote:
> Hey!
>
> My Name is Ali Albazaz, 20. I Study Computer Science in Bonn, Germany,
> second semester.
> When I was 16 I was involved in the gaim project the first time. There I
> fixed some small
> bugs with the help of Sean Egan and thats the reason why my name is still
> available in the
> Copyright file.
>
> Now I'm going to apply for the Google Sommer of Code Program and support
> pidgin project.
> I'm using pidgin now for 7 years mostly for ICQ  everyday (because ICQ is
> very popular in
> my region). Therefore I know about many feautures that the Original ICQ
> Client supports
> and the Pidgin ICQ-Implementation doesn't.
>
> Last week I started a survey (with 129 persons) to see which things are most
> important to
> the people and have to be implemented first. Here are their suggestions
> ordered by popularity:
>
> - About every 4th person complained about the file transfer problem between
> other clients.
> - Many people want the old "block" function back because in the past it
> people got blocked
>     couldn't see one online but were able to write one. The new function is
> useful but removing the
>     old function is wrong. The people need both of the functions.
> - Webcam and voice chat should be implemented
> - Flash games
> - Authorization problems: after the authorization sometimes the people are
> two times in my list and if I remove one of them they both disapear
> - Status-Messages doesn't work between other clients
> - Invisible status doesn't work sometimes
>
> The other suggestions are good but not so popular like these mentioned
> above. Therefore I picked out these themes:
> Filetransfer, block-function, Autorization, Status Messages and if there is
> time the invisible status.
>
> I want to fix this things between May 24th and August 9th - that means in 11
> Weeks.
> Maybe you have some instructions or hints to me? Are there things that are
> something like undevelopable in 11 weeks? :-D
> I would be glad! :-)

I think that's a great list, and definitely feasible in 11 weeks.  You
could possible add more to it, but I'm not sure what.  Maybe better
handling of character encoding for offline messages.

Also, you may want to look at last summer's privacy improvement
project: http://developer.pidgin.im/wiki/GSoC2009/PrivacyRewrite  It
hoped to improve the usability of blocking vs. invisibility for ICQ.

--Mark