WWDC2004

Staying? Going?

Mon, 05 Jul 2004 08:12:54 GMT

Its all over now, today we are supposed to fly back to Sydney. We checked out of the hotel at around 2pm so then we were left to walk around Union square until it was time to go to the airport. So we have lunch at this place called "Wendy's" which is a fast food burger place like a cross between Maccas and KFC. Wendy's has somehow made fast food much less appealing, partly because American fast food generally just feels more fatty, and also the number of Homeless people charging in and wolfing down a burger whenever they collect enough change. Annny...way after that we walked around a store called Macy's, sort of comparable to Myer in Aus. Then went on to visit CompUSA, by the time we walked back to the hotel it wasn't long before the limo rocked up, then Michael rushed us out the door and we were off to the airport with plenty of time to spare...about 2:30-3:00 hours of it. While checking in at the United counter the attendant mentioned they were looking for VDPs because the flight was over booked. So we decided just to check in as normal and decide later. About an our later we decided that US200 + Upgrade to business + paid accommodation was reason enough to stay for another day. So William and I went up to put our names on the list, Michael really wanted to go so...he went home on that flight. So in the end we waited another 4 hours at the airport, this time included the UA people eventually getting our bookings correctly redone and waiting for our baggage, oh and the freak'n candy machine eating my dollar! We arrived at the hotel at around 12:00-12:30 checked in showered and crashed out.

The 4th of July

Sat, 03 Jul 2004 22:48:42 GMT

Well today was an interesting day, after a late sleep in we decided to we wanted to go to the Great Mall, which is a shopping complex consisting of 6 blocks of over 200 outlets. The great mall is located about 50 miles south-east of San Francisco and being a sunday the there were problems getting into contact with the bus company for information. So we went to rent a car...we went in intending to get a normal compact and come out with a Jeep Wrangler...Well its probably the roughest and crudest thing ever to take to the road. Anyway the aircon worked and about .5 hour later we were down in Milphitas where the Great Mall is located. We walked around for a few hours and had a look at way to many cloths shops, there were some pretty neat touristy gift shops there aswell. On the way back we thought it would be a good to stop at Stanford University and take a look. Well...MASSIVE is one word to describe it...its has a really beautiful relaxing well maintained clean look and feel to its surroundings, the grass is a perfect green and the sky was a nice shade of blue, the building are not shabby at all, they all have a classic architectural feel to them. After this we come back to San Francisco and eventually found parking in an ally for the Wrangler. We then ventured down to fisherman's wharf to see what the lo-commotion was all about. By the time we arrived the fire works was over, so we settled for some BubbaGump shrimp which was pretty nice..they even come out and gave us a quiz on the movie before we got our meals.

WWDC Day 2

Tue, 29 Jun 2004 09:07:01 GMT

Day 2...Well we found out by email there was a competition for the best Dashboard component at the end of the conference. So naturally we wanted to go to the session "Dashboard Widget Development" only to find it really packed...Of course there were 3500 people wanting to win a free PowerBook.

The next session was called "Developing for Automator" which is a new product for Tiger which allows users to have a "Visual" scripting for workflow environment. This means that users can drag and drop tasks from various applications to form a workflow of actions. A very easy way to script for the end user. This session was about how to develop and deploy these actions for the end user to use. However I felt that this project was a little under developed as they kind of got beat down by the audience during the Q & A with a whole bunch of "what-ifs".

After lunch we attended the session on the new video codec called "H.264" which effectively can half the required bitrate for some existing MPEG-4 movies, so you can now get 2x the quality for your bandwidth. It looks very promising, this codec will also be used with the new iChat AV conference mode on Tiger.

Another announcement that was also received through email was that Sun invited us to come and attend the JavaOne conference pavilion area which was also happening just down the street. So in the afternoon we went over there to check it out. The pavilion area of the JavaOne conference was just massive in comparison, with hundreds of stalls set up and tons of freebies to get. Here I was able to chat with some people from companies such as Business objects the makers of Crystal Reports, IBM Alphaworks - they do some really neat research related to java, Borland who promised us that JBuilder XI will be even better and faster on mac then before, some more where HP, Sony Ericsson, BEA, Wise, Parrasoft and Macromedia just to name a few.

Back at WWDC during the evening was the Apple design awards, which is awarded to companies and people who have made outstanding use of Apple technologies. Then followed by "Stump the Experts" which is a crazy game show style session where people ask crazy questions about development related stuff to see if the Apple experts know the answer. The best one of the night I feel was "What is the most expensive album on iTunes website", the story come back with the guys on stage rang the manager of the iTunes music store, who then rang the database administrator who performed a SQL query and come up with a price of $106 for a 6 set collection of [can't remember the artist]. Anyway the experts were awarded a point for this as the price they come up with was actually more then the most expensive album the guy in the audience had. All in all it was a pretty good night.

WWDC Day 1

Mon, 28 Jun 2004 08:33:22 GMT

Yey well we its finally starting! The first session of the conference is from Steve Jobs CEO of Apple Computers. During his session entitled "Steve Jobs and Mac OSX 'Tiger'". Jobs announced the new 30" lcd display as well as an insight into Apples success into the music world. These included the release of the Apple iPod and iPod mini, as well as iTunes and Airport express with Airtunes. The next step to this was the partnership with BMW who have included a cable to connect the iPod straight into the audio system in some of there cars, included the Z4 and the awesome Mini models. The new OS that was previewed was of course Tiger. Tiger is mac os version 10.4, the next evolution in the OSX series. Some of the new features included, Dashboard, Improved windows support, improved underlying architecture and an option for programs to take care of 64-bit processes, a new and improved safari, XCode and several other new programs such as Automator. After this session we were given a copy of the WWDC preview Tiger seed to play around with and maybe start developing for. Very cool. The other sessions that I attended were "Development Technologies Overview" and "Graphics and media state of the Union". The development technologies overview was an insight into the new enhancements of XCode with versions 1.5 for Panther and 2.0 for Tiger. Some of the new enhancements are code completion and enhanced support for java, the ability to take advantage of 64-bit processes. The last session I attended was "Graphics and Media state of the Union". This session was about the introduction of Core Video and Core Data. The Core technologies are designed to take advantage of OSX's underlying optimisations, which can greatly enhance application performance. The more impressive to this was the Core Video technology. The demo presented where was the "live" application of filters to a video clip, no waiting or processing, just instant results. The Core Image package also has this same ability to apply filters for instant results. The core data package was the one I was least impressed with, although I was unable to attend a Core data session an apple engineer was explaining to me that it works mainly with only 2 data sources one being XML files and other XML type formats and also connects the program SQL Lite, an open source database server.

Student Day

Sun, 27 Jun 2004 08:40:47 GMT

Student day was about introducing students to WWDC and helping us make the most of our experience. The speakers were pretty interesting, there was also some advice from some past students who were now employed by Apple. There was then a brief introduction to some of the recent technologies such was Motion, which is really cool for video editing as well as some insight into the process apple goes through to get a 1.0 product off the ground. After this there was a lab session in which we were split into random groups and assigned to take on a Cocoa project using XCode, no one in my group had any experience with Objective-C or XCode, but we still managed to get most of it done.

San Day 2

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 21:18:49 GMT

Yep, today we took a tour of the city and alcatraz for a lean $60us. We cruized around san fran in a double decker bus, getting out at some of the attractions such as, Piere 39, the Gateway bridge, and the Japenese Gardens. Then went over to the old alcatraz prison for a while which was cool, went on the self guided audio tour wich was fun, everyone is like walking around with headsets on pretty entertaining.

San Day 1

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 21:13:43 GMT

Pretty much just arrived in san francisco and went in the organised limo (the thing was huge) to the Pickwick hotel...when we got there we just fell asleep because we were so tires from the fligh over. I was put next to this really "big" lady whos ass was invading half of my seat, 13 hours of pure discomfort!

Leaving for San Francisco

Thu, 24 Jun 2004 01:04:17 GMT

Well I leave for San Francisco tomorrow for Apple's World Wide Developer Conference. It should be a blast! Think everything is in order after a screw up somewhere between the Travel Agent and United Airlines, spelt be name incorrect somehow. Enough said, I'm off to finish packing...