WWDC Reflections
The Trip
This was the first time I’d ever left the east coast, so it was tremendously exciting and romantic prospect for me to fly all the way across the continent for a week-long geek-fest in California. Heck, I’d never even been on a plane by myself before. I’d been counting down the days ever since I heard from Apple that I got the student scholarship to go.
I got to see some of the city: the Embarcadero, Lombard Street, the incredibly tacky and tourist-ridden Fisherman’s Wharf, Ghirardelli Square, and some of Golden Gate Park.
I stayed at the Hosteling International hostel in Union Square, a choice I had initially regretted. But it turned out to be great. It’s cheap (~ $20/night), clean, has free wifi, and hosts people from all over the world, many of them fellow WWDC attendees.
It was a pretty intense week. A typical day involved going to the conference by 9, finishing by 6, going to some sort of fun nerdy party for the rest of the night, and getting back to the hostel around 10 or 11, to find everyone in the common room engaged in coding or some other form of geekery.
The Keynote
The keynote was disappointing (doubly so because students had to watch it from a “viewing room”). The new Leopard details are nice, and I’m glad to have the developer preview in my hands. One thing I don’t quite like is the new menubar; that’s going to need some tweaking. Safari on Windows is a strange beast, but will ultimately be good for Apple and web standards. And like many developers have said, the announcement regarding the iPhone was kind of an insult. I suppose it wasn’t a bad keynote, just not the blockbuster awesomeness we’re used to each year. It was funny how they had a bunch of banners covered up with black cloth that ultimately revealed nothing we didn’t already know.
The Sessions
The sessions were pretty useful and enjoyable. I learned a good deal about the new stuff for developers in Leopard and how to write more solid Obj-C code. I also got to witness possibly the most wonderfully dorky thing I’d ever witnessed: a country-western love ballad on the NSView class.
The Labs
The labs at WWDC are essential to the experience: it’s a waste if you don’t bring some sort of code or problem you’re having trouble with. I got a great deal of help from an AppleScript engineer on finishing up scripting support in ShoveBox, my upcoming app. As some will know, Cocoa scripting is a total pain, so I couldn’t be more pleased with the help I received.
The Parties
There were some excellent parties during the week. I got to meet many people I’d previously only interacted with online, plenty I’d never heard of, and made some good connections.
When I frantically designed my business cards the week before, I designed the back side of them to list my released and upcoming apps, with icons, names, and descriptions. This turned out to be a great idea. I met plenty of folks who didn’t know my name, but once they saw the back, said something like “Ohhh! Hey! Yeah! You’re the SimpleChord guy!”
The Future
The future of the Mac platform is bright. Leopard, more than the past releases, packs a lot more towards enabling developers and advancing the platform than it does in terms of visible features that immediately and directly benefit the end user (though Time Machine and Spaces are sure winners).
As for me, I’ve been energized for the past few months about bringing Wonder Warp forward with some new products and learning as much as I can about programming, design, and business. I hope that, in the coming weeks, I’ll be able to exercise some of what I’ve learned.