Volunteer

Below are a few things that we would really appreciate some help with. Also, just because a task isn't listed below, doesn't mean it doesn't need to be done! You can e-mail volunteer@… if you have something else you'd like to do for Vidalia, but have questions before you start.

Development

These days Vidalia is developed, maintained, and supported by just one overworked graduate student. If you have some development experience with Qt and/or C++, he could use your help. The TODO and list of active tickets include many of the development tasks that need to be done. Here is a summary of a few of the higher priority items:

• Tor's control protocol recently added some new status events (See Section 4.1.10) that can tell Vidalia things like, "Your server is reachable." We need to implement the ability to receive and process these updates and come up with an appropriate UI for displaying them.
• Our network map needs to be improved so the server pinpoints are more noticeable and the map image is of higher quality, perhaps using SVG if we can make the performance not so terrible. KDE's Marble might also be a good option. We also want to add some new features to the map, like graphically indicating the entry and exit nodes on a circuit, and providing server information when one of the server pinpoints on the map is clicked.
• Our GeoIP cache should be able to recognize IP addresses on the same network, both to reduce the volume of requests and the size of the cache. It would also be smart to start using Qt 4.3's QSslSocket for sending the requests.
• Instead of requiring the user to launch Privoxy separately, Vidalia should start and manage its own Privoxy or Polipo process, much like it currently does for Tor.
• Vidalia should support and use Tor's ControlSocket option whenever possible, so the control port communication is done over a Unix domain socket instead of a normal TCP socket.

Translating

• Vidalia is capable of being built for languages other than English, but unfortunately none of the developers speak anything other than English. Can somebody help us translate parts of Vidalia's interface and documentation? See our instructions for translators for help getting started.

Documentation

• Vidalia has a built-in help documentation browser, but not much for actual documentation. We need people to help improve our existing documentation and expand it to include more recent changes to Vidalia and Tor. Tor's documentation might be a helpful starting point.
• Everybody can help us keep our wiki up-to-date and add any information about installing or troubleshooting Vidalia on their platform. If you had a hard time getting Vidalia to work on your platform, please add information to the wiki about what extra steps you had to take so others can benefit from your experience.
• If you have a question that you think others may have as well, feel free to add it to our FAQ.

Packaging

• We could really use some help with packaging Vidalia for various platforms. We currently only have packages for Windows, Mac OS X, and a couple Linux distributions. It would be nice if someone could help us build and maintain packages for more distributions.
• Our Windows bundle installer is able to install Torbutton into the user's Firefox. We would also like to extend our OS X bundle installer to have the same capability.

Usability

• Are there buttons in Vidalia whose captions are misleading? Is the layout of some dialog distracting or confusing? We need help making sure that Vidalia has good usability (bonus points if you're a professional usability engineer). Please let us know how we can improve Vidalia's usability by adding a ticket to our bug tracker. Be sure to select usability as the ticket type.