Mono (C#)... 4 years later

It's been 4 years since I first started looking at C# and in particular Mono. Since January 2005, I took a course on C#.NET and even worked on a project or two, but I can't seriously claim that I'm a big .NET guy (yet). I continued to work in Java and a whole lot more with Ruby and Rails (thanks to JRuby). But just like I said 4 years ago, I'm a pragmatist about these things. Since Calgary seems to be moving to C#, I figured I should probably take a look at the lay of the C#.NET land again.

I'm still a Mac-toting fan boy and don't really want to pay for a Microsoft OS license or pay for their IDE so Mono is the only game for me. So I headed over to the Mono website. I was ecstatic to see that MonoDevelop finally works on a Mac. So I downloaded the latest Mono runtime and the latest beta of MonoDevelop. I installed both without a hitch and proceeded to build an ASP.NET MVC webapp in just a few minutes. No fuss, no muss, it just worked... Very cool.

I still work in Rails most days and in my spare time I continue to work through an iPhone App development course so Mono isn't going to get a lot of attention for a little while, but it's out of the fridge and on the back burner...

Quicktime X A/V Controls

I've been (very slowly) working my way through Stanford's CS193P iPhone development course available on iTunes U.

iTunes is a pretty good client for watching the lectures. It keeps track of where you were and if you're like me and your lecture viewing is frequently interrupted (i.e., kids), that can be a pretty useful feature.

But one of the things that it won't do is allow you to speed up the playback (at least I don't think it will). So when the instructors are talking about due dates, late assignments, and other housekeeping that doesn't really apply to you, it can be frustrating to watch through it in realtime. So if you can live without iTunes' ability to track progress, simply go find the movie on your hard drive (right click and select "Show in Finder") and open it up in QuickTime Player.

In Leopard open the "A/V Controls" window in QuickTime 7 and set the playback speed (up to 3x). After installing Snow Leopard I was sad to see that the A/V Controls window was missing from QuickTime X so I assumed you had to use the optional QuickTime 7 installation. But tonight I tried option clicking the fast forward button in the QuickTime X Player and discovered that instead of increasing the playback speed to 2x, 4x, or 8x when you repeatedly click the button, it incrementally increases the playback speed by 0.1x up to a maximum of 8x!

So there you go. Save some time and learn some iPhone development too.