WWDC08 ended a good week and something ago, but I finally have some motivation to write about it, since I was busy with moving out of my dorm and moving in to my summer apartment as well as starting my summer internship for the past few days. So, first of all, I know that it's in Apple's interest to provide the WWDC Scholarship and attract student developers because they are younger, more impressionable and more likely to adapt their programming lifestyle to the Mac kind, as well as suitable candidates for employment once they're done with college. That said, it's still more awesome from the student's point of view because the thing I am really glad about (emoticon with tongue sticking out goes here) is that I didn't have to pay a dime for it except for the Caltrain tickets.
Unfortunately, there was the slight snag that WWDC happened to fall right in the middle of the week when I was having final exams, had to move out of my dormitory and my entire family was arriving that same Wednesday. So, even though I had preponed all my exams such that they didn't interfere with anything, it still ended up being one hectic week. And because of that, I did end up missing a lot of really cool sessions, which I hope I will be able to catch up on when Apple uploads the videos for the WWDC sessions, which will hopefully be free for attendees.
KeynoteAs for the event itself, it took place in the extremely large Moscone Center in San Francisco. On Monday, the day of The Keynote, to get there by public transportation (i.e., Caltrain), I had to wake up at 6am and make my way to the station. Then, finally, at around 8 o' clock, I reached the convention center. The registration process was pretty much nonexistent in that I just went and showed them my ID and they gave me a badge and that was it. Then, I got in line for the keynote. The line was
long. It was a 30-foot wide throng of people crawling up through to the top floor of the convention center. It was so long that they had to lead this throng of people through some extremely lengthy corridors to make sure that the "line" remained within the convention center, such that when I actually entered the hall in which the keynote was taking place, I wound up, after having waited in line for more than an hour and a half and having been around what seemed like the whole convention center, at the same point at which I'd joined the line. Since I joined the line at a bit past 8 o' clock, I was able to easily get a decent seat and could see the stage from where I was sitting. However, to ease viewing for people sitting in the back rows, the hall had giant (approximately 40' by 30') screens mounted at strategic locations which meant that you never got to miss out on the action. Finally, at a few minutes past ten, the action began. Of course, everyone's seen the keynote on QuickTime by now, but it was very exciting to be there, in that room, hearing the details
live and first hand, and hastily text messaging details to anxiously waiting friends. A long time ago (2002 to be sure), Apple used to telecast these events live all over the world using QuickTime but has stopped doing that for quite a while now – I suppose the costs must be a bit much. For a while now, I've been harboring negative sentiments towards rumor sites (which now basically means the mainstream press because even the New York Times doesn't want to miss out on a juicy tidbit about the next iPhone), so I just wanted the rumor sites to be wrong about MobileMe, the 3G iPhone and Snow Leopard just to prove my point. So, the only disappointment I felt in the keynote was that all the announcements were precisely as the rumor sites said they would be. Also, the only point where it got a bit boring was the seemingly unceasing demos of iPhone apps, which I feel could have been fewer and more select.
FoodSucked. I heard there was pizza last year. I would have been more than happy with pizza, but there was the shittiest food imaginable there. It was all cold food. Sandwiches and the like. And forget about any good choices for vegetarians. Pathetic. I don't want to complain much because I didn't actually pay for the thing, but I would have been really pissed if I'd paid $1600 and then had been asked to eat that for lunch. I feel that, as a general human being, food is very important to me and having good food really livens up the atmosphere. Sucky food, of course, does the opposite.
SessionsI was mostly constrained by time, otherwise I'd have gone to more, but I was able to go to a fair number of them, including "What's new in Objective-C?", "Font Management and Core Text", "Using Leopard Features Effectively", "Leveraging Cocoa's Layer-Backed Views", "Using Garbage Collection" and "Mastering Advanced Objective-C Features". Most of them were really interesting and those that weren't were only because most of the stuff required more background knowledge than I have about Mac programming and so a lot of the stuff went straight over my head. There were seemingly people attending from everywhere at WWDC and I heard a
lot of Chinese and, for some reason, a lot of French. I was also really amused when this Chinese man, just before he was about to ask a question at the end of the session, started with a very audible "nèige" (
那个), which, if you've seen
a certain Russell Peters video, you'll know is the standard filler word in Mandarin, and which, for better or worse, bears a very strong resemblance to a word in English.
LabsI didn't... really... have anything to do in the labs because I really wasn't having any problems in my Mac application that I needed an expert to take a look at but I went to one of the labs - the Core Data lab - to check it out anyway. I feel like I ended up just wasting my time (and the time of the person who was helping me) because I didn't have anything very worthwhile to ask him. But meanwhile I saw some other people being helped and I realized that this was basically what many developers came to WWDC for and was, in effect, upwards of a $1000 to attend a very grandiose "TA help session" for a week. I felt like the guy who hadn't started the homework yet and had come to pick up feelers to see how difficult it was going to be.
And that, I think, was WWDC08 – my very first – in a nutshell.
Labels: English
