GSOC Kickstart!


The GSOC coding period has begun and I had a Kickstart meeting yesterday with my mentors. I'm in a lucky position to have mentors from 2 different Open Source organisations!
Anivar, Santhosh and Hrishikesh are the main mentors from Swathanthra Malayalam Computing, which is my mentoring organisation.

Since my project involves development of a Keyboard IME for Firefox OS, Tim, Rudy and Arky from Mozilla will also be helping me out with issues specific to the Firefox OS platform.

In yesterday's hangout meeting, it was decided that the project would be better off as an Open Source Third Party application, submitted to the Firefox OS Marketplace. The mentors at Mozilla pointed out that this would be advantageous over a built-in gaia keyboard because there would be no delays in implementation approvals from the UI/UX team of Firefox OS, especially since GSOC has strict timelines.
Moreover, the country specific manufacturers can bundle the required Keyboards as required.

Although initially my idea was to implement just Indic Keyboard, Santhosh suggested that there won't be much difference in efforts if other keyboards are ported as well, since jquery.ime supports more than 135 input methods across more than 62 languages.
Porting all the input methods may not be in scope of the project and mostly unnecessary. Hence Santhosh will be sharing the usage statistics of various language IME's operational in the various Wiki's deployed all over the world and appropriate IME's would be chosen.

Till then, I'm planning to start working with major languages like Hindi as well as the overall structure of the project. Really excited for the next few months of coding!

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