Idea of my GSoC '09 Project : Making Gnome desktop location aware

[k roy]

Hello,

I am Kalpana Roy, final year engineering student from Indian Institute of
Information Technology, Allahabad, India. Continuing with the trend of
explaining the idea of the project on the mailing list, I am describing my
project in this mail. The idea was described on the Gnome list of GS0C ideas
site (http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas) as:

*Gnome-panel: Location awareness for the clock applet*

*Benefits:* Lets users get the local time and the right timezone,
automatically. Maybe also allow selection of locations from an interactive
map.

*Requirements:* Some experience with C and maybe dbus would be helpful.

*Resources:  *http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GeoClue
                  http://blog.pierlux.com/projects/libchamplain/en/
                  http://nzjrs.github.com/osm-gps-map/
*Jussi Kukkonen jku at o-hand.com has a basic implementation of this already,
GSoC could be to clean it up and integrate.*

I discussed about the afore-mentioned idea on the #geoclue channel on
freenode. Henri Bergius (http://bergie.iki.fi/blog) helped me improve the
idea to include the following points:

   - Changing the clock time
zone<http://people.redhat.com/mclasen/intlclock/intlclock-2007-09-29.png>based
on location (
   Jussi <http://vilunki.wordpress.com/> already has a patch for this that
   needs to be cleaned up and submitted)
   - Changing weather applet to show weather for current location
   - Telling Tracker <http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/> about the location
   where documents were edited so you can ask *"give me the documents I
   edited in Stockholm"*
   - Making Gwibber<http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/gwibber-the-everything-client/>send
the
   current location<http://live.gnome.org/Gwibber/Roadmap#head-fa46c3b444c9f355f2fba1684cc7d2805e42eff9>to
microblogging services that support
   it <http://brightkite.com/>
   - Showing where your Evolution
contacts<http://www.novell.com/documentation/evolution24/index.html?page=/documentation/evolution24/evolution24/data/usage-contact.html>are
(and what their local time is), based on Empathy's
   XMPP location
support<http://blog.pierlux.com/2009/01/22/empathy-where-are-you/en/>
   - Setting instant messaging availability status based on location (*"set
   my work account as offline when I'm home"*)
   - Clock can not only automatically update the time & weather settings but
   also display the appointments specific to a location.

More about the project idea can be found at
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/making_the_gnome_desktop_location-aware/ ,
http://bergie.iki.fi/blog/making_the_gnome_desktop_location-aware/ &
http://docs.google.com/Present?docid=dd4m6zsj_5z2jbjqc9&skipauth=true&ncl=true(which
contains snapshot of the demo code built by Jussi).

I have not yet decided as to which of the features will/can be implemented
within the time-period of GSoC but I feel that inclusion of GeoClue into
Gnome desktop will make it more smart and give the users an ease of use,
automating simple day-to-day tasks without worrying about them. I would like
to seek advice from all those who are interested, regarding how to implement
the project, any modifications or any general comment.

Thanking you,
~kr0y.



-- 
~ Once you have flown, you will walk the earth with your eyes turned
skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return --Da Vinci
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