Let me pitch some ideas to you all, in hope for some feedback on what could be suitable for my GSoC application.
1. Workshop/teaching mode
Building on a suggestion by Karsten Schmidt at his recent workshop at
http://resonate.io I would like to enforce processings role as a teaching tool:
* Ability to adjust font-size without restarting.
* Highlighting of recent edits to the code (suggestion by K.S.), highlighting of current line.
* Special layout of PDE with vertical split-screen: Code (+ Console) left, scaled Canvas right. Split position adjustable.
* Debugger. Classical stepping, breakpoints, variable inspector. Ability to see visual results mid-draw(). (to learn how each frame is built up).
I guess the Debugger is a sizable project in its own right and the rest is probably too small for a GSoC project..?
Do you think there are other important features for a PDE debugger apart from the “standard-ones” I mentioned above?
2. Community Service & Evaluation
I've been hanging around the forum lately, answering programming questions and giving hints. It's a pretty nice work and rewarding too. There are discussions from line-drawing to visually proving Fermat’s theorem. So I'm thinking to make a project out of it, trying to focus the knowledge generated on the forums.
* Tend the forums, answering questions, providing help and code.
* Keep track of the type of questions, building stats. Make sense of what is going on in the community, with the possibility to feed this back into development.
* Build a library of well documented code examples for the most common questions.
* Evaluate posts and file bugs if necessary. (as stated under “Bug Evaluator”
http://code.google.com/p/processing/wiki/ProjectList)
I think a nice project to do, but maybe unsuitable for GSoC as they probably require pure coding projects. Also there are some very active users already doing part of this work anyway.
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