===== Google Summer of Code 2015 Projects =====

Hello prospective students! If you're interested in other projects than those listed above, come talk to us on IRC **urgently** as we need to put the projects down for Google before the 20th of February.

Our IRC channel is #xfce-dev on Freenode.

==== Anonymous collection of user preferences ====

**Mentor:** Steve Dodier-Lazaro (sidi on IRC, sidi@xfce.org)

This project aims to help us developer better apps for our users by understanding their needs and preferences better. We want you to develop a few components:

  - A dialog to ask for user consent and store their reply, and negotiates a unique, random ID following a specific pattern for the user (for spam protection)
  - A client application that, when launched, looks up the Xfconf settings of the user (and a few things like locale,timezone) bundles all the data in a convenient format e.g. YAML, and sends it the server over an encrypted connection
  - A patch for Xfce4's settings daemon to spawn the dialog at a sensible time and to launch the client every month
  - A server application that waits for new clients to negotiate IDs with, and that waits for existing clients to send their settings file every month; that stores these files and provides an authenticated interface for Xfce developers to access them
  - Optional: build hooks in the Whisker menu, Thunar and Appfinder to help us identify how people start new applications, and which applications they use the most.

**Skills required:**

  * Web programming! We probably prefer the server bit to be written in PHP.
  * More programming: The client bit should have a GTK+ UI, but could be done in C, Python, Vala, etc. as long as you know you have access to the libraries you need.
  * Correct understanding of encryption and computer security