Google Summer of Code and Adium

I wonder how many people have heard of Google Summer of Code ? Its main goal is the development of open source projects by attracting new young, talented and energetic developers.

A little about the features:

* only students can participate
Any interested student or graduate student submits an application in which he describes his ideas on the development of a project. The list of projects is known in advance and approved by Google. The most original and useful ideas given the green light.
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* the event is only summer
In fact, preparation begins in early spring. Already then the list of participating projects becomes known and the application begins to be accepted. In early April, it becomes known who passed the qualifying round. So, before the beginning of the summer, the participants have time to get on the ball and prepare for the hot days;)

Unfortunately, not all ideas materialize into something useful. As the statistics show, 60-80% usually reaches the end of the program.

We all know that Adium is an open source project, moreover it has been participating in Google Summer of Code for the third year already. Let's try to figure out how this Google initiative has affected the IM client.

In 2006, XMPP support was significantly improved, the PSMTabBarControl component was integrated, allowing you to move tabs, place them vertically, and “tear” them from the window.



Also that year, we tried to add support for voice communication using the Jingle protocol, but we did not see the result ...

2007 gave us a lot of goodies:

* many improvements to the XMPP protocol
* many changes were made and Bonjour support was improved, file transfer through this protocol was implemented
* made good steps to improve multi-user communication
* significantly improved support for AppleScript
* the opportunity to detach individual groups from the list of contacts



To bring up the menu, you need to right-click on the group header.

What will make us happy this year?
Unfortunately, this year only two students went to Adium.

One idea is related to internal things that are useful to programmers: adding unit testing and documenting the main parts. Objectively, quite an important task in such a project.

The second is the implementation of event detection and contact information, followed by integration with iCal and Address Book. Similar functionality has Mail , but the implementation is closed and works only under Leopard. The idea is interesting, we wish good luck and we hope that we will be able to see something similar in the near future.

If you have ideas and familiar students (or maybe you are a student yourself), able to translate what you want into reality, then you can try to take part. An additional incentive is Google’s $ 4,500 promotion.

The original test was written for McTime . Since I am one of the programmers involved in its support, I am also interested to hear your opinion on this site.