[SDL] Welcome GSoC Students!

[Holmes Futrell]

Hello SDL world!

My name is Holmes Futrell, and as mentioned it is my GSoC project to  
port SDL to the iPhone.  I'm a senior undergraduate student at UC  
Santa Barbara, and I study applied Math and Computer Science.  My  
passions include graphics programming (go go GLSL!) and anything  
relating the fields of Computer Science and Math.  Over the past  
couple years I've programmed shareware and freeware games whenever I  
had the time to do so, and if you've got a Mac, you can check them  
out.  I've got links to them here:

http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~hfutrell/portfolio/

I'm pretty excited about the iPhone SDL project.  As they stand right  
now, my main goals are to port SDL to iPhone, to make SDL a good  
citizen on the iPhone and well integrated into the system (for  
example, enabling multi-touch through SDL), and to add some additional  
SDL interfaces to iPhone specific functionality, such as grabbing the  
camera image to an SDL surface. iPhone's OpenGL ES implementation will  
also allow for a certain blitting operations to be accelerated, and so  
I'd like to apply these sorts of optimizations wherever possible.

My previous projects have all been working alone or in a small group,  
so one my personal goals for my project is to understand the workings  
of a larger development organization, and to improve my collaborative  
skills.  I'm also personally invested in seeing the project through.   
I know there are a lot of developers out there that don't want to deal  
with iPhone idiosyncrasies (such as working in Objective-C 2.0) and  
tons of code just to put up a simple OpenGL view -- I think SDL can  
work as a great tool on the platform.

I'm very excited to get to know SDL's developer community.  There are  
definitely some amazing people involved with the SDL project.   
Currently I'm very familiar with the indy Mac game developer community  
which hangs out at http://idevgames.com.  I hope that over the coming  
months I'll get to know you guys equally well :)

- Holmes

On Apr 23, 2008, at 10:16 PM, Sam Lantinga wrote:

> SDL is participating in the Google Summer of Code!
>
> I'd like to thank everyone who applied, and introduce the students  
> who were
> accepted:
>
> Edgar "bobbens" Simo:
> Bobbens is an undergrad in industrial engineering, and will be  
> working on developing a force feedback API.
>
> Aaron Wishnick:
> Aaron is an undergrad in mathematics, and will be working on audio  
> resampling and pitch shifting.
>
> Holmes Futrell:
> Holmes is an undergrad in computer science and mathematics, and will  
> be porting SDL to the iPhone.
>
> Darren Alton:
> Darren is an undergrad in computer science, and will be porting SDL  
> 1.3 to the Nintendo DS, using the hardware capabilities of the DS to  
> showcase the new features in SDL 1.3.
>
> Szymon "Wilku" Wilczek:
> Wilku is an undergrad in computer science, and wants to add support  
> for pressure sensitive devices to the SDL API, specifically using  
> the Wacom tablet as an example.
>
> I've added a page on the SDL website for the Google Summer of Code  
> projects
> and I'll be adding status updates as the summer progresses:
> 	http://www.libsdl.org/gsoc.hp
>
> Please join me in giving these students a warm welcome! :)
>
> See ya,
> 	-Sam Lantinga, Lead Software Engineer, Blizzard Entertainment