David's World

April 26, 2005

Mac: open source projects need your help

If you know how to program, and if you're fit with Mac OS X technologies and one of the common implementation languages (Objective C, Java, C), check out these fine open source projects and consider contributing work! Despite their big nanmes in the open source world, it seems to me that they need a lot of help from OS X programmers to make things work well. Current CVS snapshots of these projects are sometimes buggy, and often lack in terms of their user interface. But traditionally, that's where the Mac shines!

• VideoLanClient (VLC) - shows movies (fix those shortcuts, finally!)
  and also MplayerOSX, another movie player (needs bug fixes!)
• TeXShop - great (La)TeX editor that needs some UI 'integration' (too much clutter right now) - language: Objective C
• GNU Emacs - work on unicode and Mac user interface (fix those sliders, finally!) - language: C / (e)lisp. On OS X, you could help a lot by contributing to the AquaMacs distribution, which packages Emacs with a setup that works well on the Mac. Alternatively, work on XEmacs and Andrew Choi's port.
• Audacity - great audio editor, needs performance optimizaiton - language: Java

So, if you have some time on your hands, do some programming! It's fun and very gratifying!