Hi,

Google has announced that they are going to do the Google Summer of Code program in 2009.

Leslie Hawthorn - readers of the SoC mailing list will know about her - has suggested that organizations should start to announce whether they are going to apply this year.

One of the most important reasons for announcing early is reaching possible candidates - students who are interested in participating, and want to know an organization a bit better before committing themselves to a project.

So, there is at least one thing that will be certain:

GIMP is going to apply for Google Summer of Code again! =======================================================

Beyond this, everything is tentative:

It is fully within our responsibility to come up with a superb application, mentors (I've already asked a few people on IRC) and suitable projects.

It is within Google's responsibility to select the organizations with the best applications.

No time line has been announced yet; the number of organizations and projects to be accepted is going to be a bit smaller than last year.

As a summary, this is how GSoC went last year:

In 2008, a total of four projects have been completed. They are either in SVN Trunk already or are currently being added into it.

Three projects for GIMP:

*Improving the text-tool in GIMP by Daniel Eddeland*

"Although the text-tool in GIMP works right now, it could be even better and more convenient with more functionality. When editing text you type the text in a dialog instead of on the canvas itself. I found "on-canvas text editing" as one of the ideas listed on the GIMP GSoC ideas page, and thought it would be a good idea to implement, as it would make the text tool more ergonomic and also look a little better (less dialogs to keep track off = cleaner interface)."

*Enhance Python Scripting Interface Experience by Lars-Peter Clausen*

"The overall goal of this project is to enhance the python scripting interface experience for The GIMP.

As part of this I'll creating binding for gimp objects and widgets that haven't a binding yet but would be useful to have in python scripts. I'll also in collaboration with the community identify other missing or nice to have aspects in the python scripting interface and then try add them."

*Tagging of GIMP Resources by Aurimas Juska*

"Currently resources such as brushes, gradients, etc are presented to the user in a single list without a possibility to organize them in any way. This makes it impossible to deal with large number of resources efficiently, thus making the GIMP less attractive for both professional and casual users.

Adding tags to resources is natural and convenient way for users to organize their collection of resources so they could quickly find the ones they want for the specific task and create their own collections easily."

... and one project for GEGL:

*Operations in Frequency Domain by Zhang Junbo*

"Many of the image processing operations in the spatial domain are very difficult or even impossible, but in the frequency domain it may be quite simple. But GEGL, the new framework of GIMP, has not support operations in frequency domain yet. Therefore, a collection of operations in frequency domain for GEGL is urgently needed.

A good framework has been provided in GEGL. Operations(plug-ins) in frequency domain could be implemented modularly."

Regards, Michael