Going to Apple Thursday (sort of)

Well I'm off to Apple tomorrow (Technically I'm off to the San Jose Mariott).  Approximately every year (usually late fall) Apple holds a series of tech talks.  The last two have been about the iPhone but before that they were about Leopard (before that I'm less certain? Tiger? before my time)

The idea is that as opposed to WWDC which is held in a single location and you have to pay to go to they have a traveling roadshow for one day to hit you with information (and in very uncharacteristic  Apple fashion: It's free)

I went with Isaiah last year and it was overall a pretty good session -- Not anything mind blowing but a nice day with some good information.

The format is one big classroom where they run through approximately 6-8 sessions.  My guess is there will be sessions on Core animation, Open GL, Tools, Core Audio (less sure about that one), Core Data.   Last year Apple bought us box lunches and we got a t-shirt (sadly the shirts were all the same size).

What really excites me is what they may announce  -- Apple doesn't have that many corporate events (let's count: WWDC, Fall Music Announcement, maybe one or two other public press events) so they sometimes uses these forums to make announcements (not huge ones mind, but things relevant to developers)

Here is what I hope (pray) they announce.  An overhaul of the iTunes rating system.  The current one is horribly broken, as a developer it's horribly painful to see people complain of problems and have no way to get a hold of them to help fix it.  I do everything I can to make my support email public but a surprising number of people will just complain in iTunes instead of trying to contact me -- Case in point: About 4 months ago Netflix had a server outage for a weekend…. It didn't effect all apps but it did effect mine so anyone using my app would find a problem.  I actually worked with Netflix engineering over the weekend and by Sunday it was all back up but as you can guess I had a mass of 1 star ratings and 'this app doesn't work, wasted $1.99'.  I was going crazy trying to sort out how to contact them to say "Hey, try it again, it's a server issue that now works" but it's impossible with the current system.

Here is hoping for good news tomorrow...