A new release of TheLastRipper have been in the workings for a while and now it just about to be done. Among some of the new features are:

• Perfect clipping of songs
• ID3v2 tag
• Support for proxy settings
• Better threading
• International character support
• Many minor bugfixes

These features have been under development for a while and the Windows and Linux clients in SVN already have these features, they will be release as 1.1 very soon too. But last weekend me (Jonas) and Rene of TheLastRipper developer team, decided that it was time to get a beautiful port for OS X. So we started out with the 1.1 codebase from SVN and installed XCode, Mono and CSharpXcodePlugin on a Mac. Then we wrote one of those simple “hallo world” applications in Cocoa#, after becoming a little familiar with Interface Builder and Cocoa#, we started the development of a client using Cocoa#.

And even though the Cocoa# bindings aren’t complete, the weird behaviour of Interface Builder, minor bugs in Xcode and the fact that we wrote most of it during a hangover, the result compiles (sometimes), and works fine too. This version is now being released as TheLastRipper for Mac version 0.9 Beta, once it’s been tested a little more and the last details have been fixed it will be released as stable too.

Now a bit about Mac and Mono based development. First of I’d like to say that I’m not a Mac user and never have been, I’m a Linux user with years of Windows experience, now practiced in a virtual machine for legacy applications. Now getting CSharpXcodePlugin installed and doing the LetterCounter video tutorial is definitively a good start. But it’s difficult to find documentation for Cocoa#, I had to go with what I could get from the assembly cocoa-sharp.dll using Monodocer. The result was that we copied the cocoa-sharp.dll to Windows and added it as reference to a SharpDevelop project to enable intelliSense, since that was basicly all the documentation we could find. But once that was done, developing the actual code on Windows and the interface on OS X was actually pretty easy. Especially with TheLastRipper since all the logic is in a platform independent .dll, which means we only had to write a little clue code. Of course you need to get hang of how Cocoa and Interface Builder works, but once you’ve got that, it’s certainly possible to work with… Even though Mono on Mac isn’t as easy as it is on Windows or Linux.