The time has come :-) The list of accepted students to the Google Summer of Code has just been published on GSoC webpage and on Google Open Source blog here. We have been amazed by amount of proposals we received (42+) and overall quality of the applications have been outstanding. It was an extremely hard choice for us to select the best ones. We are also surprised by the amount of slots we got from Google. It’s our first time in Google Summer of Code as mentoring organization and I’m happy to say that we’ve received 7 slots! That means that 7 great proposals have been selected and we are looking forward to work with selected students starting from today and during the summer :-)

Here is the final list of accepted projects for GSoC 2008:

I would like to encourage all of you to read this blog post, whether you are on the list or not. I think this is “must read” for all of you. Hopefully this will help you understand how difficult it is to select best projects from the ones that we received. We had a really hard time doing evaluation/rating process and choosing those best 7. 

Student and the Google Summer of Code: What is Next?

Some information for selected students. If you have been accepted and you’re still not submitted to the NUI Group GSoC discussion group, please do so. Here is the link http://groups.google.com/group/nuigroup-gsoc. We will use this list to communicate with you, share experience, share ideas, keep track of work and also to get to know each other.  If you are an IRC guy remember about joining our #nuigroup channel at Freenode. Congratulations to all selected students !!! Great work, keep it that way!

You can find the official list of accepted NUI Group students here.

We are happy to announce that Natural User Interface Group (NUI Group) has been selected for mentoring organization in Google Summer of Code 2008.

Want to write open source code? Want to make money? Want to do both? Join NUI Group for this year edition of Google Summer of Code.

If you’re a student and maybe even a NUI Group member check out our projects ideas wiki page. Prepare your project proposal and apply ! Google is offering successful student contributors a 4500 USD stipend, enabling them to focus on their coding projects for three months. And this year you can code with NUI Group :-)

We are looking for your participation and for innovative and creative projects proposal. If you don’t find interesting project at our ideas webpage feel free to send us your own project idea. Starting from today (March 17th) students have a week (till March 24th) to discuss projects ideas with mentors from NUI Group. The student application period begins Monday, March 24th 2008 and ends Monday, March 31st 2008.

If you don’t know what GSoC is, here is a little description from GSoC FAQ:

“Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code. The program, which kicked off in 2005, is now in its fourth year. If are feeling nostalgic or are interested in learning more about the projects we have worked with in the past, check out the 2006 and 2007 program pages.”

You can learn more about Google Summer of Code at http://code.google.com/soc , remember to check out programs FAQ before you ask questions.

Also here is the latest blog post at Google Open Source blog about GSoC: Meet your mentors.

Big request to NUI Group member: Spread the word about NUI Group participation in GSoC 2008 on your blogs :-)

Leslie Hawthorn has just announced Google Highly Open Participation Contest at the OSDC open source conference in Australia. What is GHOP ? It’s a new contest that aims to introduce secondary school and high school students to open source software development, just like Google Summer of Code does for university students. Thanks to Google now even pre-university students can be involved in all aspects of open source development, from fixing bugs to writing documentation and doing user experience research. It’s a great opportunity for students in highschools to dive in open source software development and get new valuable experience.

For the contest, Google selected 10 Open Source projects which you might work for: The Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, GNOME, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python Software Foundation, and SilverStripe CMS. Each of selected projects (mentoring organizations) will provide a list of tasks the relevant project needs help with. Students choose on which particular task they want to work on and submit their work according to the instructions for each task. Students are eligible to win cash prizes and nice GHOP t-shirts, grand prize winners will get a nice free trip to Googleplex in Mountain View :-)

The contest started today and finishes January 22.

Full details are available at the Google Highly Open Participation Contest page

Post at Google Summer of Code blog can be found here.

You can also check out the contest FAQs for some more information and visit GHOP discussion group to get help or share your thoughts.

It seems that iPhone Dev Team have done great job :-) We have open source iPhone SIM unlock software. Right now it’s the first release, unlock takes about 20 minutes and it’s not for end-users (more for developers). But I’m sure that using this source code we will soon get end-user application similar to the one from iPhone SIM free team and especially for free.

More information here and here.

Source code available here.

Binaries of application here.

Official guide - here.

Unoffical guide - here.

Today at iPod event in San Francisco Apple has released another multitouch device so called iPod Touch which is of course iPhone without a phone and digital camera.

Features:

• Thinner than the iPhone - only 8mm
• Same multitouch pinch & spread zooming controls for photos as the iPhone
• Same coverflow as the iPhone
• 3.5″ diagonal screen
• Wi-Fi 802.11b & 802.11g - it can save your home network setup
• Home button
• Slide to unlock - same as the iPhone
• Sensor for auto-landscape viewing
• Safari - connect to the internet via WiFi
• YouTube via WiFi
• 22 hours audio, 5 hours video playback
• 8GB - $299
• 16GB - $399

Check out also new iPod nano (video support and new interface) and new iPod classic with 80 gb and 160 gb hard drives.

Nice comparison of all new iPods can be found here

By the way here are some screenshots of the latest build of Leopard 10.5 (I like the screen sharing feature build-in)

And one more thing the iPhone have received a price drop, moving the 8GB model down to $399 from $599 and the 4GB iPhone model is being dropped. So now the 8GB iPhone is now only $100 more than the new iPod touch model at the same storage capacity.

Watch the keynote presentation here.