It’s the time of the year to acknowledge that yes, I am going to WWDC this year. Left it a bit last minute to get the flights and the hotel, but everything is in place now so hopefully I’ll see some of you guys/gals there. This is the first year that there’s been anything going on that isn’t Mac (it isn’t the first year there’s been non-MacDev, though; since the first WWDC I attended in 2005 there’s always been an IT track occupying around 20-25% of the sessions, though not much lab space). There have been mixed impressions of that – a representative sample:
New developers might screw up the experience
New developers might realise how cool Leopard is
I think this is going to be an exciting conference, especially for the new developers. I’ve never been as a newbie; in 2005 I’d already been doing GNUstep, WebObjects, Cocoa and NeXTSTEP development for varing numbers of years, though admittedly without particular expertise. From a perfeshunal perspective I’m not amazingly excited about iPhone development, I might drop in to a few of the sessions just to see what the state of play is, what people are interested in, what apps they’re creating and so on. No, for me this is the first year that I’ve actually got a project in full swing over the conference week so I’ll be most interested in heading down to the labs and getting mmalc to write my code finding out what I could improve.
And, of course, the networking (by which I mean the going out for beers and food every night)…
See you there :-) I’m going to mostly IT related sessions as that is what I do to pay the bills! I’m a dilettante when it comes to development. I have a few Xcode projects in various states of disarray, but these are just personal dabbling. I might go to some of the iPhone overview sessions to get a view of the bigger picture as I have a few ideas related to sport that might work on the iPod touch or iPhone; given their battery life that could last all day. Especially if there is a larger form factor iPod (a la mini Internet tablet) released.
It’s actually the IT people who are the most concerned I reckon Graham.
Sometimes it’s felt like IT is the red-headed stepchild of WWDC, and having another whole new development stream, plus the fact that the number of IT sessions were reduced is making IT people a bit unhappy.
There’s a lot of talk about how Apple have outgrown Moscone West, and really, 5,000 places isn’t enough for a conference that is meant to cover three tracks like that.
On the other hand, I’d hate having the IT conference become a separate one, as I enjoy being able to go to the dev sessions as well.
Anyway… I guess we’ll see how it goes…. I’ll see you there too….
Interesting. My first inclination was to disagree with Nigel and suggest that breaking out the conference into ‘dev’ and ‘IT’ would be the best thing to do, but then actually it wouldn’t; all of Sophos’ customers are IT types, for instance, so were there no IT track at WWDC I wouldn’t be able to use it as a chance to network with users. Conversely the conference wouldn’t have been so pushed for time as to have removed all of the developer feedback forums from the schedule; there’d be more in-depth sessions (many of which I could happily skip in order to get to the labs). In fact, there isn’t even a late-night labs this year.