GNOME Summer of code tasks

I spent some time today trying to invent some interesting tasks for GNOME summer of code 2009. My favorite list for now is:

• Text summarizer in Epiphany
• Improved spell check for GEdit
• Doxygen support for gtk-doc
• Desktop-wide services for activity registration
• Automatic workstation mode detection and more AI tasks desktop can benefit from
• Cleanup of the Evolution interface where sent and received mail are grouped together
  

The list is probably too boring, but one should note that usually summer is to small to implement something serious and students are not that experienced as one want to see them. Some of the tasks were rejected already, though it's not a big deal. I just find discouraging that the list of the tasks proposed officially is even more tedious.

The overview of this issue makes me think again about GNOME as a product on the market and the possible ways of it's development. It seems that we are now at a point when feature set among competitors are stabilized and it's hard to invent something else in a market. So-called mature product stage where it's important to polish and lower costs. The big step is required to shift product on a new level. Probably I need to investigate the research desktops that completely change the way users works with the system. For example I'd love to see better AI support everywhere like adaptive preferences, better stability and security with proper IPC and service-based architecture, the self-awareness services, the modern programming language. I'm not sure I'm brave enough for that though.