An Amazing WWDC

Well, WWDC ended yesterday. I'm a little sad about that, though I am looking forward to getting home to my wife and kids. I miss them quite a lot. I find it hard to believe that I used to travel as much as I did. I'm not sure how I handled doing that as long as I did.

Right now, I'm waiting at my hotel in San Francisco until it's time to go to the airport. My brain's not yet quite awake enough to write code, so I thought I'd finally get around to doing a short post about the week. I had the best intentions of doing some status updates during the week, but time was a scarce commodity this week, and many of the nights I got less than four hours sleep (something that used to be much easier for me).

I have very few complaints about this year's show. There were a few sessions that were, in my mind, mislabeled a bit as to their target audience (high level sessions being marked as "Expert", for example). The name badges were also printed in 14-point font so that they couldn't be easily read, But those were tiny blips in an absolutely great week. I doubt that many Apple folks read my blog, but for any of you who might stumble across it, thank you all so much for this past week. I know you all kill yourselves for the months leading up to WWDC. I certainly appreciate the effort you put in, and so does most everybody I talked to this week.

Even if the content hadn't been so great, this week would still have been one amazing week. Thanks to the extraordinary power of the intertubes, most especially the power of Twitter, I was able to meet an awful lot of my wife calls my "imaginary friends" - people that I have interacted with only on the internet. I also met an awful lot of new people.

This week was very special for me personally because it represents the completion of a very long-held goal of becoming a part of the Mac (and now iPhone) developer community. For years, Cocoa was my hobby, done as my work and personal obligations allowed. While I had written for MacTech and participated on and off in the Cocoa-Dev mailing list for years, I was alway on the sidelines and never felt like I was truly a part of the community. I think I can safely say that I have achieved my goal, and it feels good.

It has struck me for years that in the Mac development community there is a very low asshole ratio. Almost everybody is nice. I mean, direct competitors not only get along, they often even consider each other friends. People are relatively unselfish and are happy to help others, regardless of skill level. The iPhone dev community seems to have picked up on this trend, something that I'm very glad about.

And as weird as it sounds, though the people here this week came from many different places and different backgrounds, there was a sense of camaraderie and friendship that's hard to explain or imagine.

Though most of what I learned this last week is under NDA, I can tell you that some (not all, but some) of the information will fall out of NDA on June 17th which is only a few days away. At very least, I plan to update my OpenGL ES template for 3.0 (already done, it just can't be posted until 3.0 GM is released to the public) as well as updated versions of the projects that accompany the OpenGL ES articles. I've also got two more OpenGL ES articles in the pipeline, though it may be quite some time before I can get them done. I'm very behind on some writing projects thanks to this week and have to give that work priority.

Let's see... this is a little bit of a rambly posting, and I apologize. It takes a few days for my brain to recover after WWDC. I didn't take many pictures this week, but I'll finish off by sharing just a couple of things I did shoot.

The first truly odd thing of the week was the fact that a porn producer targeting the iPhone platform paid a bunch of girls to circle Moscone West wearing bikinis while advertising a website and a soi-disant "launch party". For the benefit of those who weren't there, or who got in line early, here is some video (don't play if watching bikini girls yelling "iPorn" is not appropriate where you are):



I'm hardly a prude and do not typically object to seeing attractive young women in very little clothing, but I do have to say this whole thing struck me as odd and somewhat out of place. I can understand the thought process behind this - there were going to be 6,000 geeks in one place, the vast majority of which were young men. But... it just seemed like a bad fit. And though this is probably an indication that I'm getting old, my first thought was to honestly feel bad for the young women. It was so not bikini weather that morning. They were however, as one commenter on YouTube put it, "troopers" about the whole situation. I can't imagine it's easy to be excited about freezing your ass off for money.

Here's another odd, yet wonderful thing from the week for me: I got to meet one of Apple's co-founders: Woz.



For those of you who haven't met us, I'm on the left, Dave Mark is on the right. And though I look drunk in that shot, it was taken just as we arrived and I hadn't actually started drinking yet. Oh, well.

Woz (in the middle of course) was just as nice as I've always heard. Having learned to program on a machine that he designed and for which he wrote much of the operating system, it was really something to get to meet him.

Well, time to pack so I can make the long journey back to my home. Save travels to everyone on their way home.

Posted in: WWDC