[Adium-devl] GSOC Application Questions

[Conrad Owen]

Hi, my name is Conrad Owen, and I'm applying to the Google Summer of Code to
try and create a better UI for Adium's group chat. I was wondering if I
could get some help writing my application for this summer.

Right now Adium's group chat UI is not really different from its one-on-one
chat UI, which is just incapable of efficiently displaying a group's
conversation. I would use iChat and Colloquy for reference points, taking a
certain number of key ideas in efficient group chat display from their
examples. A couple of the things that I can already think of changing would
need to be removed are the user icon displays and the graphics that usually
group together blocks of statements made by a single user. User icons take
up valuable screen real estate and statement blocks are often interrupted by
other chatters, thereby rendering the usefulness of the statement block
graphics useless. I would try to stay as true to the feel of Adium as much
as possible, but it's clear that there are a number of changes that need to
be made, and I would like to help make them.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of experience with Objective-C, but I do
frequently program in Java, C++, Python, and Ruby, so I have a lot of
object-oriented programming experience. I'm finishing up my freshman year in
college (3.6 GPA) and am a computer science major, so between my teachers
and a lot of the books they've recommended, I've got a lot of reference
material for the summer. I am known for motivating myself to work, and have
taught myself most of the programming techniques and languages that I use
today by modifying open source software.

Is there something more I should add to these basic ideas for an
application? Perhaps expand or talk less about certain points? Any help on
the application would certainly be appreciated! Thank you!
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