Category: Technology

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WWDC, Day Four

Only three sessions today because we’re leaving early for Apple’s campus in Cupertino for the Beer Bash. Apple offers free shuttle buses, but this year we decided to chip in for a van and drive ourselves there. Part of the magic of visiting the Apple campus is getting to shop in the company store and when you ride the buses with the unwashed masses, the lines can get pretty long. Thus, we’re going to get there an hour earlier and have our run of the place.

In the meantime, here’s some pictures for your enjoyment.

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WWDC, Day Three

Another day, another five sessions. Here’s some bullet point observations:

  • Seat Nazis: Each of the rooms where the sessions are held have a few room management personnel. This year they are very aggressive in urging you to sit in the front and move to the middle of the row. My co-worker, Dave, says, “I paid $1500 for these seats, bitch. I’ll sit where I want.”
  • Wireless access: This seems to be a problem every year, but you can always resort to the Ethernet hookup if you’re desperate for access. Mostly, though, I’ve been able to use wireless in sessions and during breaks.
  • Snacks: Cookies, brownies, candy bars, sodas, coffee, espresso, tea and Odwalla juice. No Krispy Kremes yet. Also, nothing healthy. (Update: Today it’s rice krispie treats and oranges.)
  • Snacks redux: The catering staff really sends the nerds into conniptions here with their inexplicable schedule. Yesterday we left a session after about halfway through and found the caterers putting out big trays of cookies. However, ten minutes before the session ended, they carted all these full trays of cookies away. When the rush of people came out after the session ended, no snacks remained. That kind of irregularity drives engineers crazy. Also, not having cookies drives them crazy.
  • Lunch: Today they had box lunches which was totally idiotic. I had to take two so I could get the maximum amount of salad and meat. That resulted in having to throw away two rolls, two carrot cakes and two fruit cups.
  • Lunch redux: They only provide Snapple Pink Lemonade and Brisk as lunch time beverages. This upsets the caffeine-hungry masses.
  • Women: There are more women here this year than I’ve ever seen at WWDC. Evidently, they let women be engineers now.
  • Outsourcing: Evidence of outsourcing is everywhere. There are many Indian and Asian attendees this year.

I’m taking the night off tonight to catch up on sleep.

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WWDC, Day Two

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Today was the first day of sessions that deal with the new technologies in detail. Five sessions from 9:00 am until 6:15 pm which makes you pretty tired by the end of the day. Luckily, Tuesday night is when Stump the Experts is held. Stump the Experts is a psuedo-competition between the developer audience and a panel of experts consisting of former and current Apple employees. The experts give questions to the audience via the big screen on stage and the audience submit questions to the experts via 3×5 notecards. The questions are focused on Apple history, technical knowledge and minute trivia. Scoring is done very loosely and correct answers from the audience are rewarded with prizes, some good and some bad. This year one of the booby prizes was an ADB mouse turned into a wireless mouse on the spot (the mouse was rendered wireless by a pair of scissors). As usual, it was great fun and the audience/expert relationship was humorously contentious. The event ended with a tie, but that’s hardly the point.

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WWDC, Day One

Today was the first day of WWDC. WWDC consists mostly of lecture sessions about the technologies in Mac OS X and how to use those technologies. The most exciting session of the week is the first: the legendary keynote by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. This is when Steve unveils all the great new stuff that they’ll be doing during the next year. This year’s keynote was as good as any I’ve attended.

The most anticipated news was the introduction of the Mac Pro line of desktop computers. This was the final step towards an all-Intel line for Apple and all evidence indicates that they saved the best for last. These machines will feature:

  • Two dual-core Xeon processors at 2.0, 2.66 or 3.0 Ghz
  • Four hard drive bays with easy-to-install sleds
  • Two optical drive bays
  • $2500 base model with many build-to-order options

But this was just the start of the goodies that Apple introduced. Next spring they plan to ship the next version of Mac OS X, code-named Leopard, and it is packed full of great new features:

  • Time Machine: Seamless backup for all of your files with greatest user interface ever put on top of backup software. The demo for this was incredible.
  • Boot Camp: Boot into Windows on your Mac.
  • Spaces: The virtual desktop idea done right.
  • Improved Speech: Apple has been using the same speech technology for about 20 years it seems. Now they’ve got speech technology that sounds very human and is very, very close to natural.
  • iChat Theater: Show someone a slide show, movie or presentation while chatting with them online. Totally awesome idea and I hope they don’t require the video conferencing as they showed it today.

Leopard is shipping next spring but we got a “Preview” copy for free today. Everyone was madly installing it on their laptops during lunch. Nerds are so funny!