I'm back from WWDC 2008 and catching up with real life. It was fun, busy, tiring, informative, interesting, and packed with people engrossed in their laptops. I met a whole bunch of people who I knew online, as well as seeing many of the regulars from Cocoaheads. I've posted 94 photos at SmugMug, several of which are posted here.

Keynote

The keynote is of course very popular. I arrived two hours before the start and was about halfway back on the right. Here is the view I had of the procedings:

Seeing the real thing was great, but unless you have a good seat there is much real but not very much thing. Lots of excitement, but I was more interested in the state of the union talks that occurred later in the day.

Al Gore was at the keynote, and I snapped a photo of him in his way down on the escalator:

Room and Board

I kept the cost down by not staying in San Francisco and spending >$250 a night. Instead I commuted from the south bay, which, while inexpensive at $10.50 for a round-trip BART ticket, took out four hours from each day, much of which came at the expense of sleep. Finding parking at Fremont BART can be hard if you don't get there before 7am, so that pretty much controlled my timetable. By Thursday I was way too tired and went home early, so missing the bash.

The food was pretty decent, especially considering that there were more than 5000 people there. Pre-packaged cold lunches were served at midday, and there were things to nibble on several evenings. Breakfast materials (doughnuts, bagels, etc) were there at 8am. The afternoons saw snacks and fruit arrive. Coffee and tea was available much of the time. I brought extra food and ate it all.

Sessions and Labs

The sessions themselves were very well done. The sound systems were excellent, so I could sit anywhere and hear perfectly well. Many of the seats had power strips attached to the legs so I could juice up my MacBook while I listened. The speakers, typically engineers and others working directly with the technologies, spoke and presented well. The product evangelists and other engineers were on hand for the Q and As that followed each session.

I didn't get a great deal out of the labs, but that was mainly because I didn't have specific questions or problems, and had no app to show. The User Interface lab was completely sold out. The people in the labs rotate each day, so I only found out too late that I had missed the experts for a certain subject in the Graphics and Imaging lab and those that were there could not help me. So it pays to ask exactly what their schedule is day to day.

Cocoaheads

Tuesday night was Cocoaheads in the Apple store and it was packed:

There were a selection of indy Mac developers present talking about their companies and applications. Scott Stevenson has more information on his blog. Unfortunately there were no recordings made.

Infrastructure

Wireless networking was everywhere and hard ethernet ports were in several areas. On only a couple of occasions could I not get a signal. The infrastructure could sustain an awful lot of traffic: the only time I had to wait for anything was when I needed a 1.6GB installer and found that almost everybody at my table was downloading it at the same time.

Everything Else

There were non-Cocoa happenings too. Juggling took place on level two most days:

and there were many informal groups getting together and chatting.

The Apple Design Awards went quickly as they had a lot to cram in: Mac and iPhone this year. The little cubes light up when you touch the top, as you can see in this photo:

It was a pretty good place for photography, but only if you like taking photos of geeks with laptops and have the equipment to contend with low light and busy backgrounds.

Light levels and color vary enormously. I lugged a backpack with 20 lbs of computer and camera gear with me all week and got some pretty good photos. However I was constantly changing lenses. My favorite lens was the 85mm f/1.8 (about 135mm equivalent). I can see why people with full-frame cameras rave about the 135mm f/2L: it's a very useful length and aperture. The only lens I took but didn't use was the 50mm f/1.8. I used the 17-55 f/2.8 instead. A longer focal length would have been useful at times, but probably not worth the weight.

Next Year

Will I be back in 2009? Probably yes. It's expensive (especially since I'm self-employed) and a lot of work, but it's definitely part of being serious about development with Cocoa and Objective-C. I've come back with all sorts of ideas and a head full of knowledge that I would not have had otherwise.

Tags: WWDC, Apple, CocoaHeads, Laptop, Photography, Juggling, Al Gore