GSoC 2020 ideas

For information, if you’d like this to be part of GSoC we’ll need a spec document in Markdown. Google does not accept forum threads or even GitHub issues as spec documents.

For now Abstract / Spec / External Links would be a good start. We can always improve afterwards. See also some examples of spec there: https://joplinapp.org/gsoc2020/ideas.html

it does not belong here but I may ask anyway. Where did you find that?
At least discourse is in markdown, so easy copy & paste will be possible :slight_smile:

It's on the GSoC website you linked the other day. They mention that we shouldn't simply link to GitHub but write proper specs.

Keep in mind that this page is often the first view of your organization by Google and potential student applicants. A link to your bug tracker does not an Ideas Page make.

bug tracker but that not exclude forum, it shall look nicely and be accisle easily.
Both can be achived. I will double check anyway.

It's true but the issue is that it's hard to organise the various documents in the forum. Also we already have everything on the website, versioned with GitHub, so I think it's already quite good that way.

Actually I'm just rewriting all the ideas into a single page based on various examples I saw. One thing I've learnt is that the ideas shouldn't be too detailed because the student needs to make a proposal and that's how we can assess if they'll make good students or not. If we put detailed specs (as I did originally), they'll just submit that and that will miss the point of GSoC.

I'll push the document soon, and we can add more ideas to it.

For example here's the first one:


1. Support for multiple profiles

The applications should support multiple profiles so that, for example, one can have a "work" profile and a "personal" profile. This will also make it easier to share notes: for example a "work project" profile could be created and shared with co-workers via sync.

We want to offer this feature by allowing the user to select a profile from the app (eg. "work" or "personal", then switch to it. Switching would be done by restarting the app and loading the selected profile.

Expected Outcome: The user should be able to select a profile and switch to it.

Difficulty Level: Moderate

Platforms: Desktop and/or mobile (at the student's choice)

Skills Required: JavaScript; React; React Native (for mobile)

Potential Mentor(s):

More info: GitHub issue, Forum Thread

I’ve added the updated pages there:

Mainly I’ve compiled the various pages we had into two and simplified the ideas (I’ve moved the technical specs to GitHub in case it’s useful later on).

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that is great news :smiley:
Thanks a lot for updating the list.
I will update the application template.
Shall there be an option to discuss the ideas here in the forum?

Sure we can add one. How do you want to add this? Like a link to the forum from the GSoC page?

@PackElend, I’ve merged the gsoc and 2020 tags into “gosc-2020” as it’s easier to manage. I’ve also removed the 2020 tag since users add it to their post but it’s not a very useful since there’s already a date on the post.

Can we discuss potential ideas here as well? There’s a feature I’ve found in another Markdown editor that I found quite neat, called seamless live preview where you can see the formatting being applied directly while typing.

I don’t know if that’s something desirable for what Joplin does, but that would be an idea.

There’s a feature I’ve found in another Markdown editor that I found quite neat, called seamless live preview where you can see the formatting being applied directly while typing.

I don't know how I forgot about WYSIWYG, I'll add a project about it in the list.

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Another potential suggestion is the concept of centralising the organisation of notes around tags.

A notebook would be a filtered view of notes, ie a list of notes that contain a nominated tag (or set of tags). Similar to the Gmail email organisation, but even more powerful.

By default, Joplin would look exactly like it does today, but it would also support an alternative more flexible ways of organising notes at the same time.

It was discussed a little bit here: https://github.com/laurent22/joplin/issues/375#issuecomment-544583685

Is this something that could be considered?

for whatever reason I was tracking not watching, in the future, the answer should arrive quicker.

There are now two additional ideas, whereof one has already taken into account.

we need to decide where to discuss the idea, here or in GitHub as discussion are currently split, what makes it a bit of a chalange to manage them.

I suggest, that ideas should be proposed as a new topic in Features - Joplin Forum, so that they evolve there before it is copied to ideas page.
The first post in such a topic should be structured as described in Internal URL/hyperlink - #10 by laurent

  1. abstract , which is at the beginning already explains why it is needed.
  2. specifications is basically the requirements document (as referred to in software engineering, but the term ‘specifications’ is mostly used these days).
  3. external links section provides proof that other people would like to see this feature as well.
  4. Mentors whereby saying there "searching for mentors" is acceptable

As soon as we have an agreement, the GSoC page will be updated accordingly.

A post was split to a new topic: “Hub and spoke” architecture for Joplin

https://joplinapp.org/gsoc2020/ideas.html

changed in OP

how about adding an option to use Custom stylesheets, it is properly an easy project with big benfits