Monthly Archives: July 2007

Cocoa programming job

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I haven’t been updating this blog anywhere near as regularly as I’d like. This is for a number of reasons, including the following:

  • I had my finals at the beginning of June
  • The usual post-exam festivities actually managed to consume what remained of June
  • I’ve been on holiday to the Maldives

The good news, however, is that finals went very well – I’ve just graduated with a first class degree from the University of Cambridge, making me a “BA MSci (Hons) (Cantab)”. Or something. My dissertation, entitled “Systematic determination of patterns of transcription factor expression in Drosophila melanogaster tracheogenesis.”, was deemed to be the best in the year, scoring 85%.

On Monday I’m starting work (for 3 months) at the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, probably continuing work on this, a program for DNA sequence annotation. It’s a great opportunity as I’m basically being paid to learn how to program using Cocoa. Admittedly, the pay’s not great, but it’s better than nothing…

Anyhow, a side effect of this is that I’ll (hopefully) be posting more about the ins and outs of Cocoa as I get to grips with it. My girlfriend has kindly armed me with a copy of Hillegass to help along the way…

Frame number in QuickTime Player 7.2

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Apple’s recent introduction of QuickTime 7.2 finally added the ability to view movies in full screen without having to shell out an additional $29 for QuickTime Pro. On top of this and “Updates to the H.264 codec”, there were a couple of other enhancements to the software.

Predictably, options to export to iPhone-optimised formats were included (both H.264 and 3GP “Cellular” – the latter presumably for viewing in MobileSafari). There was also one other minor tweak, which I haven’t seen mentioned anywhere else – the addition of an option to view the frame number in QT Player rather than the current time, as shown here:
QuickTime Frame Number