PLUG member and University of Manitoba computer science student Jeff Green has been accepted to Google Summer of Code. Jeff will spend this summer improving GnuCash, a free software accounting package.

Google Summer of Code is an initiative of the "do no evil" search engine which owes it's success to free software. This program gives grants to free software projects to hire students to work on projects over the summer.

From Jeff's abstract:
I will complete the rewrite of the GnuCash registers to use GtkTreeView instead of the custom cells that are currently used. This will improve the performance of the register views as well as the integration with the other aspects of the user interface. It will also make registers easier to maintain and extend in the future, since they will use a well-documented general API instead of a custom-made solution.

I for one find GnuCash's register to be painful to use and am looking forward to this improvement. On behalf of the user group, I congratulate Jeff and look forward to a demos of this work at a future PLUG meeting.