Illicit footage from WWDC on YouTube: James Dempsey and the Breakpoints singing Release Me, I Love View, and Designated Initializer.

It's probably the best-kept secret of WWDC: all the sessions are set to song. I hope someone posts Bertrand Serlet's crooning.

Tags: Cocoa, WWDC, Objective-C, Breakpoints, Video

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

Stripey Hat: 1/160s f/9.0 ISO200 120mm, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS

I'm treating WWDC as a photography opportunity as well as a Cocoa opportunity. I'll be taking a collection of my own lenses, plus two that were leant to me for the week. I don't have a flash (except the one built into the Canon 30D), so I'll be challenged by low light.

The 80mm f/1.8 is equivalent to about 135mm, good for across the room shots of people, and the longest lens I am planning in taking. The 24mm f/1.4L is equivalent to about 38mm and will be good close up. Neither of these have image stabilization, so although they will give me low-light capability, it will be blurry if I can't hold the camera still enough. That's why the 17-55 f2.8 IS may be there as well: it's the widest and has IS. I'll also carry the 50mm f/1.8. It's plastic, very small, light, and inexpensive.

Since I'm commuting each day, I'll be able to switch equipment often, ditching the things I find myself not using. It's possible I'll lug the very heavy 70-200 f/2.8L IS around, but I'll need a very good reason. Other than camera and lenses I'll take nothing special. Maybe a tiny tripod, but otherwise just things like spare cards and a spare battery, download cable and a card reader. I'll be processing the images on my Macbook using Aperture and uploading to SmugMug when I get a chance.

Tags: Photography, WWDC, Lenses, Canon

Attendees were picking up their badges at Moscone West this morning. I bumped into Fraser Speirs there.

No Doubt Who Is Here: 1/2000s f/5.0 ISO200 24mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon 24mm f/1.4L

No word on whether there will be any sort of Aperture meet-up so far. There's plenty going an already actually. I planned my sessions the other day and it is packed with good stuff.

Blue and Purple: 1/250s f/5.6 ISO200 24mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon 24mm f/1.4L

Tags: WWDC, Aperture

I'll be at WWDC next week, commuting daily from the South Bay. My iChat handle is bagelturf@mac.com, so feel free to say hi. I'm likely to be wearing one of these shirts, so you might be able to pick me out from the crowd of five thousand or so attendees.

I'll be there with my camera gear, including two lenses that were loaned to me by a friend, so there should be plenty of photos that week. Check my WWDC 2008 gallery for updates.

Predictions? A tough call as always. I have an almost 100% record of being wrong, but here goes:

1. 3G not only in the new iPhone, but in all new laptops from here on

2. A switch to LLVM as a base for all code compilation

3. A paid software update service for developers -- just like Software Update, but with more bells and whistles

4. A new .Mac offering scalable back-end services to iPhone developers

Tags: WWDC, Photography, Wild Guesses, Apple

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

White Tree: 1/640s f/8.0 ISO200 70mm, -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200L IS f2.8

Since I'm now developing a real Mac application (known as PP for now), I've taken the plunge and signed up for WWDC. It will be my first year and it will be busy.

I'm in the SF Bay area, but far enough away that commuting to the show in San Francisco makes no sense; so I'll have to find accommodation for that week. Does anyone know of a good (and not oppressively expensive) hotel in the Moscone area?

I'm coding this app in my spare time, progress is slow. I'm learning a great deal about how the frameworks are put together and how they should be used. Typically I get something wrong when I add a feature and then figure out what the right way is as I work through the issues that uncovers. Invariably I end up with less code, and find my code shifting to more sensible places. At that point I know I'm done and can move on.

I'm tackling the application in a simple way. I know that the main purpose of the app needs a whole lot of supporting functionality, so I'm writing that support first. Once all those pieces are in place I will start on the main event. This has the advantage that by the time I get there I will have had a lot of time to think about how I want to do it. And by the magic of object-oriented design, much of that should be independent of other decisions, such as how I store documents on disk and how the windows and views work.

Tags: WWDC, Apple, Applications

Stand out in the crowd with a Cocoa tee-shirt. I've a few more ideas that I will convert into products when I get a chance.

You can buy this one from Zazzle. It has white lettering with the code [self setNeedsDisplay:YES]; on the front and the back. You can pick any dark color shirt you like. I get a cut of the proceeds.

Tags: Cocoa, Tee Shirts, NSView, setNeedsDisplay, Fun, WWDC

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

The Aperture Users Professional Network is having a get-together on Tuesday at WWDC. Click on the image to RSVP. I might be there.

Tags: Aperture, WWDC, Plug-ins

From my ignorant position as an outsider, I have three predictions for the super secret features that will be unveiled at WWDC 2007. Unfortunately one of them has just been stolen before I could make it. Sun's Jonathon Schwartz announced today that ZFS will be the default file system in Leopard. This is very good news. ZFS provides enormous advantages in flexibility, manageability and reliability over current file systems.

I better get the other two out before they get leaked as well:

OS-Level support for Windows NT applications
We already know that Apple is shying away from virtualization. But why is that? Because it still requires copies of Windows and all the problems that that entails. Much better is to run the applications directly, like WINE does. The implementation would include sandboxing so that Apple can provide a completely secure environment for running Windows apps. Apple could have been working secretly on this for many years and polishing it to perfection. It would provide the best upgrade path for companies who don't want Vista (almost all of them) and draw many more people from the Windows world.

A New Kernel
Mach has its problems and has needed a lot of work to make it granular enough to provide the performance needed by Mac OS X. So my third prediction is that Mach is out and something else is in. Be has shown us that a correctly-written kernel can provide excellent media, and real-time performance, so why would Apple not be doing this? It won't be Linux. My guess is that it will either be home-grown or something few people have heard of.

I am hoping that I will do better than my MacWorld 2007 predictions -- all wrong.

[Update: All wrong again. But then we've not seen the whole of Leopard, so I still could be right]

Tags: WWDC, Wild Guesses, ZFS, Microsoft, Apple

For developers, another WWDC 2006 presentation is available via iTunes: IT State Of The Union.

Tags: Apple, WWDC, iTunes, Interesting Stuff

Regular (cheap, non-paying) ADC members like me can now download and watch one of the presentations given at WWDC last year. It's 500MB H.264, 1 hour 32 minutes. You'll need an ADC login to download it via iTunes.

Tags: WWDC, Interesting Stuff