WWDC 99
Yesterday I spent the day at Apple's annual World Wide Developers Conference. Now, I've never been a big Apple developer - I played around several years ago with Symantec C++ and found it fairly opaque, and anyway, since I started programming as a career I found myself less interested in recreational programming. So I was mainly interested in going to WWDC to learn about what some of the other groups in the company are doing, and about some areas of the Macintosh that I'm not really familiar with.
WWDC is primarily five days of lectures by Apple staff about just that: What the company's been doing lately, and how it will affect Mac developers. The conference opened with interim CEO (yes, he's the "iCEO") Steve Jobs presenting some of the coolest stuff, including the new Powerbook line, which apparently will out-perform pretty much anything out there, while also being thinner and lighter. Yes, it's pretty tempting to buy one, but truly I don't really need a new Powerbook at this point. Maybe - maybe - if Starcraft can't run effectively in client mode on my current one, but even so, that's pretty silly.
Word is that attendance at WWDC was up 40% over last year, which is pretty impressive. I also got the strong impression that in the pre-NeXT era, Apple was largely standing still (paralyzed by lack of direction - or by too many directions - I guess) in maintaining its technologies, but now it's listening to its developer base and upgrading things like AppleScript while preparing to port them to the new Mac OS X platform. It was pretty clear from some sessions that the developers were very impressed and happy that Apple was producing what they announced. It's quite cool.
I attended a session on AppleScript, because I've never really used it and wanted to learn about it. I also went to a session on the low-level tools which will support the Carbon APIs for Mac OS X, on the new FireWire networking technology that Apple is moving to, and on new Java runtime support. Yes, there's a lot more going on at Apple beyond that, but I was only there for one day, and WWDC lasts all week! Plus, I am still reeling a bit from all the WebObjects training I've been through this spring, and didn't feel up to sitting and listening to more lectures. I got a taste, which is what I wanted. Maybe next year I'll have more of a background to appreciate the whole conference.
Intriguingly, it seems that the WebObjects sessions were filling their rooms and spilling out the doors; very impressive given that WebObjects is just about Apple's only Enterprise-wide software package. I wonder if this will push Apple to enter into that market even more? I dunno. What do I look like, a marketing guy?
Tonight I went back to WWDC to attend what was supposed to be a WebObjects party for our engineers and our customers/users. I had understood that I would be able to get to the party with my Apple badge and without a specific WWDC badge, but the guards at the convention center refused to let me in. (I didn't have a badge today because we were sharing badges among multiple QAers in my department, so I returned my shared badge yesterday so someone else could use it today.) Since I didn't have a way to contact anyone who I thought would have the authority to override the guards, I bagged it. Rather annoying, but that's life I guess. I wondered on the way home if I could have been more assertive somehow (yes, a running theme in my life lately), but I couldn't for the life of me figure out to whom I would have projected this assertion. The guard was just doing her job, and obviously had been instructed to behave in a specific manner, and giving her crap wouldn't have gotten me anywhere. So, oh well.
Tonight: Did laundry, bought groceries, watched the semi-infamous "final Luther Mahoney episode" of Homicide, and that's about it. A light day; tomorrow will likely be busier.
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