Google Summer of Code

<p>First of all, I want to apologize for the long time without any news, but live's busy.</p>
<p>This year I deciced to apply for awesome <a href="http://code.google.com/soc" target="_blank">Google Summer of Code</a> for the first time. I applied for '<a href="http://code.google.com/soc/gnome/appinfo.html?csaid=CD3CECAA07C74D08" target="_blank">Refactoring Deskbar-Applet</a>' as part of GNOME. Thanks to <a href="http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/">Rapha&euml;l Slinckx</a> who's part of GNOME's 2007 SoC comittee, maintainer of Deskbar-Applet and last but least my maintainer for this year's GSoC, I was accepted.</p><p>My task is to refactor Deskbar-Applet to make it easier for 3rd-party applications to embed Deskbar and to make Deskbar maintainable again. I already did some <a href="http://live.gnome.org/DeskbarApplet/Architecture" target="_blank">analyses of Deskbar's current architecture</a>. It turned out that especially the GUI part is a big mess and full of hacks to solve focus issues.</p>
<p>In addition, I learned that <a href="http://developer.mugshot.org/wiki/Big_Board" target="_blank">Big Board</a> is already using Deskbar as a embed widget and they're looking forward to see progress in this field. <a href="http://www.johnstowers.co.nz/blog/" target="_blank">John Stowers</a> told me that he adopted Deskbar's plugin system for <a href="http://www.conduit-project.org/" target="_blank">conduit</a> and was able to speed up module loading time by 30%. That's great news and I'm definitely grateful for his efforts.</p>
<p>I'm currently analyzing the code and thinking about a better design. The plan is to seperate the core completly from the GUI part and create a D-Bus interface so that 3rd-party applications can access Deskbar easier. Moreover, Deskbar will most likely come as a single GUI in the future (no button/entry mode anymore). Raphael also suggested to extend the handler API in order to allow actions for each search results. E.g. if you find a file you could open it, copy it or e-mail it to a friend.</p>
<p>I'm looking forward to all this tasks and hopefully the new, better Deskbar-Applet will be included in GNOME 2.20.</p>