Unless you've been living in a cave for the past weeks, you're probably aware that the Google Summer Of Code has been launched.

There are several proposals that will have a direct impact on Skrooge's evolution:

Plasma : Grid and Grouping Containments : The idea is to have a plasma containment that would allow for disposing plasmoids in a grid. Yeah, well you may have understood it right from eading the title. This could be used by any application to display plasmoids in a Grid layout. I know the Kontact folks are interested in such a thing. Why is this important for Skrooge ? Because it will allow for

Plasma Dashboard in Skrooge : Using the aforementionned containment, we can replace our current Dashboard, based on standard QWidgets, by plasma technologies. Why (again) ? Because Thy Shall Not Reinvent The Wheel. Here is a screenshot of our current Dashboard:

It is a grid of widgets, each being specialized in displaying a small bit of financial information. You can customize it to your liking, by adding or removing widgets.

Does this sound familiar ? Yes, that is exactly what your favorite desktop does with plasmoids. Or Amarok, with its own specific widgets.

It works quite well, but

1) It does not look as nice as it could

2) We had to implement many things like adding or removing widgets, Managing columns layout, configuring widgets...

Moving to plasma would solve these issues, while allowing for even more functions, and opening the ability to create skroogoids to more people.

And here is a sketchy idea of what it might look like with plasma...

OK, instead of displaying Skroogoids, it displays the calculator plasmoid, but I bet you get the idea. To achieve this, we need the Grid Containment, a dataengine passing information to Skroogoids, and Skroogoids.

We also need to find a way to save the Dashboard configuration inside the Skrooge file, and not in a separate configuration file.

The great news is that we already have a candidate willing to work on this subject, a nice guy from India called Siddharth Sharma. He's highly motivated, so I'm sure he will come up with great things and he's been in touch with us ever since the idea was published in the GSOC wiki page.

Financial information in Nepomuk : Last, but not least, this project proposed by our friends at KMyMoney would allow for greater interoperability between any KDE application using nepomuk. That would allow for interesting bridges between Financial apps, but also between PIM and financial apps. Lots of fun ahead !

So, if you're a student looking for getting involved in GSOC, have a look in those. And have a look in all other ideas in that page too, there are plenty of good very interesting topics to work on.

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