Summer of Code – Page 9 – MetaBrainz Blog

Looking for Language Liaisons

As some of you may know, this summer through Google Summer of Code I’m working on internationalization of musicbrainz-server. As outlined in my proposal, I’m currently looking to find what I call “language liaisons”: folks willing to be the go-to person about a given language for me and other developers.

What’s expected of liaisons:

Willing to be pestered occasionally, by me or other developers, about language-specific concerns: when adding new features, and thus adding new strings, we’d like to be able to ensure nothing’s added that will need to be changed before it can be translated into a given language.
Willing to file bugs for strings already in the database that are untranslatable, should you find them.
Be on the musicbrainz-i18n mailing list; this will be the main venue for organization and communication about i18n issues.
Ideally, to be an active translator for your language – but this isn’t a requirement, because I’d like to get the widest global coverage I can; even if a language doesn’t currently have a translation, we don’t want to unintentionally sabotage future translators with untranslatable strings!

I’ll also be determining a (related) list of “target languages” for the summer, with the intention of releasing translation on musicbrainz.org with these languages at the end of the summer. I’ll consider for inclusion on this list languages that are both in active translation on Transifex and have language liaisons.

If you’re interested in being a language liaison, please contact me: ianmcorvidae (at) musicbrainz (dot) org, editor ianmcorvidae, or ianmcorvidae on IRC, and join the mailing list.

If you’re interested in i18n generally, please join the musicbrainz-i18n list. For more information on my project and musicbrainz-server i18n, see the server internationalization wiki page, my post on my personal blog, and my official proposal, or come ask about it on IRC or the mailing list!

Summer of Code: We've been accepted!

We’ve been accepted for Summer of Code! Interested students: Start at our ideas page or come up with your own idea!

We're applying for Summer of Code again!

The Summer of Code application process has just begun and we’re soliciting feedback on what projects we should suggest to students this year. Please take a look at our Summer of Code Ideas page and add your ideas if its not already there.

Thanks!

MusicBrainz Android app now available in the Android Market

Jamie McDonald has continued his Summer of Code work and has submitted the first version of the MusicBrainz app to the Android Market! If you would like to be able to look up releases by barcode, search for artists and rate/tag data in MusicBrainz, this app is for you:

MusicBrainz App in the Android Market!

I’ve already used this application in a number of social situations where someone wanted to know some music info and I was able to look it up very quickly. Its quite handy! Also, an iPhone version is still in the works.

Thanks very much for your continued work on this project, Jamie!

Accepted Summer of Code projects

First, many apologies to our Google Summer of Code students for not posting about which projects we had accepted for this summer. The NGS release took an amazing amount of time and I’m finally getting on top of the backlog of things to catch up on.

Now on to introduce the projects for this year:

Eliza Gebow (Batsy) has been accepted to hack on Embeddable Widgets that will allow anyone to embed a MusicBrainz widget into their site/blog/whatever that will dynamically display MusicBrainz information about artists, releases, recordings and possible works if there is enough time. You can follow Eliza’s progress on her blog.

Ian McEwen (ianmcorvidae) has already been madly hacking on improving our timeline and statistics pages. The goal of the project is to provide MusicBrainz users with a comprehensive tool for examining the growth of the MusicBrainz data and to understand how changes in MusicBrainz features and policy affect our database. Follow
Ian’s progress on his blog.

Last, but not least, Michael Wiencek (bitmap) is spending his time this summer hacking on Picard. First Micheal is focusing to make Picard ready for the NGS site — as we were developing NGS we didn’t have the resources to make Picard ready for NGS. Michael is fixing this and adding some new features to Picard as well. Michael has overcome his dislike for blog and you can follow his progress on his blog.

Most amazingly, both Ian and Michael have already shipped working code as part of their GSoC work. Ian’s bare bones timeline is now live on the NGS site and Michael has already released a new beta version of Picard. Amazing stuff — please keep up the good work!

We've been accepted for Summer of Code!

The title just about says it all! Once again we’re in good company!

We've applied for Summer of Code

Google’s Summer of Code program is starting up for 2011 and we’ve applied to be part of it again. If you have any ideas for projects that Summer of Code students should tackle for MusicBrainz, please head over the the Summer of Code ideas page and add your idea!

I hope we get to participate again — last year was productive and fun!

Care to take the Android app for a spin?

Google Summer of Code is nearly over and the Android app is coming along nicely. If you want to download and try the application, here is a QR code for you:

Once we’re done with debugging the application we will release it to the Market.

Summer of Code: Accepted projects

Congratulations to the following students for being accepted to Summer of Code for MusicBrainz:

Jamie McDonald (jdamcd): MusicBrainz Android Mobile Application
Sean Burke (leftmost): Improve collections feature
Jens Lukas (jensl): Development of an iPhone application for MusicBrainz

We’re currently in the community bonding period and work on these projects will start soon. Currently Jens and Jamie are reconciling their respective applications into one coherent application specification so that the application we deliver for Android and iPhone behave in similar manners.

Congratulations Jamie, Jens and Sean!

Summer of Code 2010: We've been accepted!

I’m proud to announce that we’ve been accepted to Google’s Summer of Code program again!

If you’re a student who is interested in participating in Summer of Code and would like to apply to work on a MusicBrainz related project, review our ideas page first. Then review the information we’ll be asking for on our Organization page for GSoc.

On March 29, the student application period starts. If you are thinking of applying, start the process now — getting to know the community and community review take a bit of time to complete, so don’t delay!

Good luck to applying students!