WWDC Wrap Up

It's the last day of WWDC and I just finished my last session -- I thought I would share with you, my loyal reader, a few thoughts on WWDC.

As you probably know, WWDC is Apple's "World Wide Developers Conference". It's organized around three tracks: Mac, iPhone & IT. There is usually some stuff that crosses two of the three (for instance this year a number of sessions had info relevant for both iPhone & Mac, or Mac & IT.)

The sessions are organized into 75 minute blocks, with two in the morning and three in the afternoon -- They leave a generous amount of time for lunch (but usually have guest speakers) and there are many social activities in the evening (the only apple sponsored one is the 'bash' on thursday -- the rest of organized by various parties)

This is my third year going so I've begun to see some interesting patterns. For instance there are the folks who go mostly for social reasons -- They typically miss the morning session because they were out too late -- Often skip afternoon sessions and in general can be found surrounded by a group of people chatting it up.

Then there are the IT guys -- I really feel sorry for them because there really aren't that many sessions that are just IT specific so you often find them going to technical sessions. Some of them are pretty sharp and can follow along but often times it's stuff that that they just don't use enough so it makes it hard for them to follow along.

Then there are the corporate types -- People who's company sent them. They tend to hang around other people from their team and are pretty picky about which sessions they chose (and will skip sessions if there is nothing relevant to what they do) -- You can usually spot them because they are running entourage checking email constantly.

Finally the intense 'go to every session' guys -- that's where I fall -- I tend to attend every session (even if the choices are not terribly interesting to me).

Finally there are the labs -- I've always heard that the labs area a great resource but I've never used them much. In the labs the Apple engineers around a certain technology get together at a certain time and you can bring your problems and they'll help you fix them. This year for the first time I had a problem that I didn't have a good solution for and so I went to the labs. It worked out really well as I got to speak directly to the experts who gave me some really good ideas.

I wish I could talk about what I learned this year -- there are some exciting technologies in Snow Leopard that I really think will change the kinds of apps you can easily do so I'm really looking forward to it's release.

Ciao for now..