Ideas for a Hackathon?

My college, the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, holds it’s annual techfest, Shaastra, every October. This year, our LUG is pushing for a hackathon to accompany a small FOSS conference (that we’re trying to make big). This will the first time any of us are trying something like this out, and I’d really appreciate any ideas, etc. anyone can give either on how to conduct it, or on some hackable projects.

Glade Gotchas

Glade is awesome, no denying that. It’s clean, unlike any other ‘GUI building tool’ I’ve seen. It generates an XML description of the GUI, which is parsed at runtime. It’s simple, and hence easy to use (by virtue of the previous two attributes). At the same time, it does have it’s idiosyncrasies (and limitations) as well, only I’ve never really used the signal callback connector it provides to discover it for myself. It took a bit of googling before I could figure it out.

GObject Properties

After creating a number of signals and functions on my own to handle my class’ fields, I reaised that GLib 1-uped me, and already has a frame work for that; properties. Properties are well exposed to the rest of the framework, can be elegantly handled using the g_object_set and g_object_get functions, and of course, emit signals whenever they are modified. This means you get signal creation free of cost. This was something I didn’t find well treated in the tutorial.