Hi readers! I am Angela Mazzurco and I am very grateful to the GSoC community
(Google, Freifunk, RetroShare etc.) for giving me te possibility to participate
as GSoC student this year!
I study Architecture and Engineering at Pisa University, and here in Pisa I am
involved in the local community network (eigenNet/Ninux.org).
Thanks to the local community I get to know RetroShare and now I use it on my
daily life when I am in front of my laptop. Remote comunication today is very often
displaced from the personal computer to the smart-phones, because of this very
often I have to downgrade to less ethical and less secure communication
platforms, because most of my friends are reachable only on the smart-phone.
This last unfortunate situation inspired me to help developing RetroShare for
mobile phones.
In this deirection the RetroShare community has already done some effort but
still the Retroshare Android app is in an early stage and need much improvement.
I‘ll give my contribution to this big project, trying to solve issues with the
interface and helping to develop it, to make it user friendly and easy to use
for all users.
During the community bonding period I started to prepare the developing
environement with suggestions from my mentors, I have been remotely meeting them
on RetroShare and I have been successful compiling RetroShare for desktop, and
now I am preparing the toolchain to compile RetroShare for Android, that is not
so easy as it may seems.
The application interface is writted in Qml, a language part of Qt framework,
so my first steps have been prepare Qt Creator IDE to, and to create my own fork
of the Retroshare project [0].
The app comunicates with the Retroshare API to get the information, using unix
sockets, and also with the native Android operating system, using JNI (Java Native
Interface).
After having the toolchain working I’m going to start improving the QML
interface, adding features, improve the integration with Android operating
system, improve usability, and fix a bunch of bugs.
Cheers!