[GSoC2012] Introduction / Impress smartphone remote control

[Andrzej J. R. Hunt]

Hi everyone,

I'm also very excited about being accepted for taking part in GSoC this 
year. I'm going to be working on adding smartphone remote control for 
LibO Impress, specifically implementing an android app to control 
presentations. To make up for the fact that I can't devote all my time 
to the project (due to exams) until the middle of June, I'll be starting 
on the coding quite soon.

About me: I'm a first year Engineering Student at Cambridge University 
-- I don't yet know what type of Engineering I'm going to end up 
branching into, but electrical is looking most likely at the moment. I'm 
quite interested in mobile development, and also have a new found 
interest in network communication (mostly arising from the research I 
did while looking into how I should implement the remote control). It's 
still a long time until I graduate, so I don't have any plans for 
afterwards yet...

One point I'm not yet too certain about is how the Libreoffice component 
will be written, I think it would be most elegant to write a GPL'd 
python plugin, mainly since the only cross platform bluetooth library is 
for python, and released under the GPL (but then having a GPL'd plugin 
would probably mean it would have to be distributed separately).  
Alternatively, avoiding the GPL, I'd have to write separate code for 
each platform, and use dbus under linux in order to get around GPL 
issues since bluez is GPL'd (in which case I'd probably use C++ as the 
programming language).

I'm looking forward to working with Libreoffice this summer (and 
hopefully beyond)!

Andrzej