Report from WWDC

You’re not going to see many discussions of talks from the conference, and this is no exception.  Beyond the keynote, the only talk I can discuss is one I went to today, which was a public talk by Amit Singh (author of the most excellent Mac OS X Internals, which I didn’t bring with me in case the plane tipped over in flight) in the Apple Store across Market Street from the conference.

Amit’s presentation style is as engaging as his writing, and he didn’t let the wrath of the demo gods spoil what was an engaging talk.  While he was necessarily light on substance (he couldn’t just read the book out, or we’d all still be in there) the demos gave indication of what is possible with Mac OS X and the material discussed in Internals.  In terms of OS X mentality we’re of the same stable, although he clearly knows much more about the system than I could ever lay claim to.

I got to ask him what the best and worst features of Darwin are in comparison with other UNIX.  His answers were interesting and enlightening; best is the pragmatism Apple engineers use in generating new API or taking from existing code; worst is the poor approach to open source taken by Darwin.  I couldn’t agree more.