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

Scott Stevenson (above) has posted videos from the May CocoaHeads. They're available via a torrent as well. The main topic was a rapid introduction to Cocoa.

CocoaHeads Silicon Valley continues to draw good attendance. I'm sure that the WWDC meeting will be packed just like it was last year.

Tags: CocoaHeads, Video, Xcode, Apple, WWDC

Two videos and slides of the April Cocoaheads meeting is now available online. For details, see Scott Stevenson's blog entry. There's a total of some 750MB of material.

It featured Scott (seen above) on user interface design, and Joar (below) digging into the debugger.

I'm in the audience asking intelligent questions.

Tags: Cocoa, CocoaHeads, Mac OS X, Movies, Xcode

Deric Horn gave a very informative one-hour talk at Cocoaheads at Apple in Cupertino this week covering the developer improvements in Cocoa for Leopard. There are so many improvements under the hood that it is hard to remember all of them and Deric's talk served to fill in those blanks. Attendance was very good, and there were plenty of new faces. If you live anywhere nearby it is worth a visit. We meet in Town Hall, building 4. That's the auditorium where Steve Jobs introduced the new iMac, iWork, iLife, and .Mac in August.

I recorded the audio on my Canon S3 and edited it in GarageBand. You can download the file (AAC stereo, 30MB) via the Silicon Valley Cocoaheads page.

Tags: Leopard, Programming, Cocoa, CocoaHeads, News, Canon, S3

Chris Hanson has announced NSCoder Night: every Tuesday 7:00pm to 9:00pm. Anyone who is interested in Cocoa/Mac programming can show up at Orchard Valley Coffee in Campbell to get help, give help, show, write, debug, whatever. Scott Stevenson has an announcement that features a Google map.

The first meeting is of course after Leopard's release, so the NDAs will no longer apply and there will be much rejoicing.

Tags: Cocoa, CocoaHeads, Coffee, Programming, NSCoder

Cocoaheads this month is Thursday 11th, and the subject is Google APIs for Cocoa. Scott Stevenson has a page with more information. I'll be there.

Tags: Apple, CocoaHeads, Google, Cocoa

There have been 900 downloads of the audio recording I made of the Cocoaheads meeting at the San Francisco Apple store during WWDC 2007. That's a lot of interest! Ten days after posting, there are still about five downloads made each day.

Tags: CocoaHeads, Apple Store, WWDC

Brian Christensen of Alien Orb Software has kindly volunteered to host the audio files from the WWDC Cocoaheads meeting that was held last week at the Apple Store in San Francisco. You can get the two MP3 files totaling 132MB from his Going Indie page.

Tags: WWDC, CocoaHeads

Wil Shipley, Brent Simmons, Gus Mueller, and Daniel Jalkut (left to right) answer questions about "going indie" at Cocoaheads held at the Apple store in San Francisco to coincide with WWDC 2007. It was packed. There were at least 200 people there. The speakers were great. Photo credits go to lukhnos.

I recorded the audio for the entire event and hope to have someone clean it up for me next week. I'll then be able to post an MP3 or AAC file for download.

[Update: The audio is available here.]

Tags: WWDC, CocoaHeads, Apple Store, Photography

I plan on being at the AUPN meeting tonight in San Francisco, meeting some of my readers and catching up with the realities of professional photography.

On Wednesday I plan on attending the Cocoaheads meeting at the Apple Store in San Francisco (7pm). The topic is Going Indie. With WWDC happening this week, there will be a greater than average concentration of Famous Names.

Tags: Aperture, WWDC, CocoaHeads

CocoaHeads on May 10th at the Apple campus in Cupertino features John Anon giving a presentation on writing Aperture Plug-Ins. More information on Scott Stevenson's site.

Tags: Cocoa, CocoaHeads, Apple, Aperture, Plug-ins

The second Thursday of each month sees a meeting of Silicon Valley CocoaHeads, usually on Apple's campus at 1 Infinite Loop. This month the topics are Core Animation and Related Leopard APIs (starter), and Cocoa Binding Tips And Tricks (main course). I will be there, trying to get my head around bindings one more time.

Tags: Cocoa, CocoaHeads, Silicon Valley, Apple, Interesting Stuff