Summer of Code/2015/ImageViewerJSshrey

About Me

What is your name?

Shrey Anand

What is your email address?

Email Address - shrey.anand@ymail.com, shreyanandwhatever@gmail.com

What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?

Sugar Labs wiki Username– Shrey

What is your IRC nickname on irc.freenode.net?

IRC nickname on irc.freenode.net : shrey_yay

What is your first language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)

My first language is Hindi. I’m fluent in English.

Where are you located, and what hours (UTC) do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)

I live in New Delhi, India(Standard Time +0530 UTC) I tend to work from 4.00 – 20-00 hours (UTC)

Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer

I have not worked on a project before this in open source. I started coding an year back. I’m now comfortable in C, C++, python , java and JavasScript. I’ve learned these languages and made elementary programs with them and participated in competitive programming but I think open source projects are a great way of implementing these languages, since you can read code written by professionals, improve them, and then write your own code. As stated by Richard Stallman in one of his interviews that students in colleges should contribute to open source as their college projects instead of making new projects from scratch, I think open source projects give us a vantage point to real and professional programming. This summer I would like to contribute to Sugar Labs for the port of ImageViewer activity in JavaScript.

About my project

What is the name of your project?

ImageViewer JS (port of ImageViewer activity)

Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?

I will make an Image viewer in JavaScript( a web application) which will be similar to existing python Image Viewer in Sugar and will have additional features. The application will be made for students. It will induce creativity and learning through its playful user interface and fun tutorials attached with it. The detailed structure of the application is explained further.

APPLICATION FEATURES

• The application will be able to view images from local disk or web
• It will be able to edit images, rotate, scale them.
• It will have advanced image processing features such as

1) Crop, resize

2) Control brightness, contrast, sharpness, noise etc.

3) Apply effects like sepia ,grayscale ,vintage, lomo etc.

4) RGB controllers. Three sliders for R, G, B, with which students can increase or decrease respective values of the pixels of the image.

5) For convolution filters, we can have an input matrix(3*3) in which weights can be adjusted by the students.

• It will support Slide show of images
• It will also support text addition
• Drag and drop option
• Save edited image
• The application will also have Exif support.
• It will have touch interface for the devices supporting touch technology.
• The application will have a Plugin mechanism for adding further effects and features.
• The application will have a “fun facts” or “ tutorial” section. In this section children will be introduced to the world of pixels. How pixels make an image and how they can be manipulated using the ImageViewer application. Each filter will be explained through description/ images/ animations. This will encourage them to think out of the box and if their effects created through RGB data manipulation are good enough they can create their own plugin! The RGB controllers can explain how pixels values can be changed in an image. Incresing all RGB values with the same amount increases the brightness, taking average of RGB values can give grayscale effect, for advance filters like blur,sharpness, edge detection which use convolution filters, an input matrix (3*3) will be made so that students can enter different weights and see the consequent result. All these will be accompanied by live examples explained thoroughly in the tutorial section. Reference links for further advance study will also be given. ( A demo of this can be seen in the prototype mentioned below)
• Documentation

USER INTERFACE

• The UI designed will be different from existing Python Imageviewer activity and will have Pedagogical significance. Children of ages young (3–5), mid-range (6–8), and older (9–12+) have different likings of UI of web apps as shown by studies. (source http://www.nngroup.com/articles/childrens-websites-usability-issues/ )

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• A User Interface with bright colors, medium-large font will be designed appealing to the minds of all children belonging to all age group.

APPLICATION FRAMEWORK/LIBRARIES USED

• The application will use HTML5, CSS and JavaScript
• In JavaScript two libraries will be used –

1) JQuery- for transitions ,and other events

2) Most filters will be written from scratch in javaScript so that they can be explained easily to the users.

3) Caman.JS- It is a predefined library for effects, It’ll be used only for much advanced effects and filters.

• The application will use Canvas 2d and not traditional SVG because canvas is best for pixel manipulation.( source: )

• 

• The application will not use Webgl, instead it will use canvas 2D because for a small number of objects the difference is not much whereas canvas 2D is supported by more number of browsers. Source( https://developer.tizen.org/dev-guide/2.2.0/org.tizen.web.appprogramming/html/guide/w3c_guide/graphics_guide/performance_comparison.htm)

What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is from May 25 - August 21 tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (27 June); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then

WEEK	TASK
27 April - 11 May	Pre program week 1 – Discuss the final features required with my mentor walter, libraries to be used, any other information that is needed pertaining to the project
11May -25 May	Work and Plan out the design of the application, Cross browser compatible design and solutions
25 May - 1 June	Create the structure HTML,CSS ,Create JavaScript to load images (semester exams in college).
1 June – 8 June	Add basic features - fullscreen, orginal view crop, resize, rotate start working on UI
8 June – 15 June	Add advance features, filters- grayscale brightness blur,sharpen vintage,lomo etc initiate tutorials
15 june – 26 June	Implement Plug in mechanism, touch interface, drag drop option, save image Functioning application with almost all features will be ready.
26 June – 3 July	Mid term Evaluation Buffer week,
3 July – 10 July	Add more features if required Check the code in multiple browsers, cross browser compatibility Testing
10 July – 22 July	Enhance tutorials. Present the code in front of kids and teachers, Note the challenges faced and collect their feedback,
22 July – 5 August	Make changes to code according to the feedback, Clean up UI, Fix bugs, Finalize
5 August – 11 August	Polish tutorials, Write documentation
11 Aug – 21 Aug	Wrap up the complete work and submit the code for Final Evaluations

Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences,credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.

• I joined sugar labs a month back and from then I’m only concentrating on ImageViewer activity, I was considering to improve the original python imageviewer as a project but since this time focus was on JavaScript and a port of imageviewer was required, I learned JavaScript and am determined to make a well designed, structured ImageViewer.

• I have developed a prototype to show how the application flow will be and how its interface can look like.

     https://github.com/Shreyanand/ImageViewerJS

• Creativity- The project focuses on both the working code as well as the interface of the application equally, so like in my prototype the UI of the application can be made more attractive and child friendly.

• Optimization – I believe in creating code that is optimized to its best. A simple example: preloading images using image object of JavaScript instead of creating HTML image object. This helps in speeding up. Source( http://www.techrepublic.com/article/preloading-and-the-javascript-image-object). Small differences like these can go a long way. If such care is taken before

writing every line of code, a robust application can be created.

• I was rank 393 worldwide and 31 in my country in a programming competition organized by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) called IEEExtreme 2014.
• GSOC is top priority in summers, will work for around 45-50 hours a week and more if required.

• I’m familiar with submission, review, Github process

• I'm familiar with sugar environment, source code, activites

• I enjoy working with C,C++,java,Python, and JavaScript, HTML, CSS

Me and the community

If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the Sugar Labs community? Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers from members of the Sugar Labs community, at least one of whom should be a Sugar Labs GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.

My thoughts:

The project will be completed successfully.

ImageViewer activity is an important cog in the sugar labs machine, It provides a graphical visualization of study material which reduces cognitive load and helps learners in managing their ideas and making connections between the information resources. Our brain defaults to images for words, when it can. We remember images. We forget words. When kids first start to read, their brain tries to interpret letters as images. Put several letters together and their brain has to think through each individual letter as an image. At some point, it reads combined letters and thinks of the image, instead of the word!

No educational material is complete without Images and Imageviewer is an essential program to view them. Sugarlabs is creating web support for children who can’t afford an OLPC laptop, so Imageviewer in javascript running in any browser will help out to reach many more children who can benefit from sugar.

This ImageViewer in JavaScript will have a new child-friendly UI and many new exciting features.One of the most important benefits of this activity is that it will induce learning. Image processing is a vast field and many creative things can be done through it. My application will also focus on how children can understand pixel manipulation. Through this they can learn how filters actually work and how they can create their own effects. Creativity has no bounds and when given the right tools one can create unimaginable art work.

Walter Bender

Image is a core modality of human expression. But we have few tools within Sugar to let the user manipulate images. Thus the importance of the project. But taking it a step further, we have an opportunity to engage the learning in some powerful ideas as they engage in expression with images: exposing them to the inner workings of image processing, not just doing the work for them, can make the application of the tool a learning moment.

Gonzalo Odiard

The impact on SugarLabs community would be to have better tools to understand how the images are processed by the computer, and increase the possibilities of expression of kids.

What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?

Getting stuck is not an option, If a problem occurs and my mentor isn’t around then

1) I'm sure there will always be willing developers from the sugar community who can help

2) IRC and mailing lists of sugar are a great way of asking doubts

3) Internet is always a nonperishable source

4) I’ve subscription to libraries if needed

5) I’ve friends and teachers in college who’ll be ready to help whenever I need it.

How do you propose you will be keeping the community informed of your progress and any problems or questions you might have over the course of the project?

• Create a Wiki page for overall project state containing: ToDo, wishlist, setup, how-to send patches/pull reqs, etc.
• Maintain a blog for detailed weekly progress and how the development is coming along.
• Questions asked via IRC and/or mailing list.
• Major milestones announced to Community via mailing list.

Miscellaneous

We want to make sure that you can set up a development environment before the summer starts. Please do one of the following: Send us a link to a screenshot of your Sugar development environment with the following modification: when you hover over the XO-person icon in the middle of Home view, the drop-down text should have your email in place of "logout".

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Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.

I’ve always been a keen learner . I like to explore new things. As a child I was always fascinated by how laws of nature worked in rhythm explained by simple mathematical formulas, Later in my life when I started coding, I realized it is nothing but a structure of logical statements just like how nature works. The fact that I can create anything in this virtual world encourages me to code.

Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more?

I believe that educating children  is the most effective way in which one can make a difference in someone’s life and from personal experience I find that teaching is a great way of clearing my own concepts.  While  developing the prototype and demo tutorials of this project a lot of my own doubts got cleared.

The whole process of preparing , researching  and then making the GSOC project fosters so much understanding and creativity and if the end product of the project is itself a tool for learning then there’s nothing better than that. One of the reasons for joining Sugar Labs was so that I could be a part of this learning environment.