There’s a report by Edd Dumbill about the Mono project developer meeting, and it includes some good information about the long term goals of the project. I downloaded and fooled around with GNOME long before it was part of any distribution, and did some hacking for the Palm Pilot interface. But for a few years my involvment has been limited to running the packaged system made available by RedHat. Lately I’ve started to get more involved in general user applications, and my interest in the projects have started to pick back up. In particular I was looking at Straw, a news aggregator for GNOME, and using Scheme to develop visual applications. Last time I fooled around with it, getting GNOME to just compile was a bitch, and playing with bleeding edge applications burnt a lot of time. This time around I’m hoping that running the latest stable release will be enough that I can experiment with the apps I want. It seems like the developer facing parts of Mono are getting a lot of attention, so maybe it really is the right time to jump back in.