Google has accepted GIMP as a sponsored application for a while now in SoC 2008. 5 Projects have been accepted, and today is the official coding start for the developers!

Here are the facts on the projects!

• Tagging of GIMP Resources
  Tagging of GIMP Resources project aims to provide easy to use tagging functionality which would greatly help users to manage resources and make it possible to organize large resource collections. Additionally, platform-independent resource file import and export functionality would be introduced.

: Aurimas Juška | Mentor: Sven Neumann[/i]

• Improving the text-tool in GIMP
  Some parts of this can been already seen in Gimp 2.5. The developer aims to increase functionality for the text tool, such as different text styles and on canvas editing! Therefore Daniel Eddeland (the develper on this) ports the gimp text core to pangocairo.

: Daniel Eddeland | Mentor: William Skaggs[/i]

• Search-based Menu Browsing
  In this project the developer wants to provide a possibility to search easy for functions and filters by typing the filter you want to find in a text box. This would greatly increase the speed for all users, because many functions are sometimes difficult to find.

: Evan Estola | Mentor: Michael Natterer[/i]

• Enhance Python Scripting Interface Experience
  This is a project not only but mostly for plugin-writers. Bindings for gimp objects and widgets are being created which do not exist yet. The developer takes a close look at the need for those objects in the community!

: Lars-Peter Clausen | Mentor: João Sebastião de Oliveira Bueno [/i]

• Operations in Frequency Domain for GEGL
  Many of the image processing operations in the spatial domain are very difficult or even impossible, but in the frequency domain it may be quite simple. But GEGL, the new framework of GIMP, has not support operations in frequency domain yet. Therefore, a collection of operations in frequency domain for GEGL is urgently needed.

: Zhang Junbo| Mentor: Øyvind Kolås[/i]

The official list by Google can be found here:
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/gimp/about.html

All projects will get to the public audience after 2.6, so you won’t see code of this projects in the next stable release of GIMP. However parts of the new text tool will (hopefully) be in GIMP 2.6 already when the next version is being released!

Next steps: In mid of July the SoC mid term evaluations will take place, and we hope to bring you new information by then!

We would like to wish all the students good luck and fun with their projects ;) The community appreciates your work for this great open source program!