Why, I hear you cry? Because I love the way the multimedia keys plugin integrates with Gnome so that I can simply define Play, Pause, Stop, Next Track and Previous Track within my Keyboard shortcuts, and then just use the Fn+<apt_key> as defined on my laptop's keyboard to skip away with all my music !!

Great. 

By following the excellently simple instructions here I was able to get the CVS version of f-spot downloaded and building. I then took a quick peek in the src directory and saw a file called SlideView.cs. I edited the following section of code:

 private void ShowNext ()
                {
                        StopTweenIdle ();

                        if (current_idx != next_idx && next != null)
                                this.Pixbuf = next;

                        current_idx = next_idx;

                        black = false;
                        transition_interval = 75;
                        flip_interval = 5000; # Changed from 2000
 
                }

And then ran make all install. That's it! I can't believe how easy it all was. Since I'm partially interested in this whole Mono thing, and like the look of f-spot as an application, I've decided I'm going to try and enhance this a little by adding the ability to edit this value from within the menu. It would probably make the most sense under "Edit -> Preferences". If I can do this successfully hopefully I'll have learnt a bit of C#/Mono along the way, and maybe I'll even try and submit it as a patch.

Hard to believe, but I think this is the first time I've taken a look at the source code for a desktop Linux application, and it's been a very pleasant experience so far. Use the source!

Update: 2006-09-13

I've discovered on the f-spot mailing list that someone's already submitted a patch for this specific issue. Would be great to see it make it into the next release!