Straight Outta Cupertino
(Sun Jun 12, 2005) [/MacOSX] #
I'm headed home from WWDC. The ol' brain is full and I'm exhausted in that good kind of way. Last year we got an enticing preview of Tiger, but we couldn't really dig into it. This year was all about how to put the bumper crop of APIs and technologies in Tiger to good use, and for the good of users. Most of the sessions I attended were directed hands-on exercises.
Frankly, I could care less about the Intel news. I didn't buy a Mac for the chip inside; I bought it for the whole experience. Then again, I don't have to port a Mac application over to a universal binary. But with the number of applications that have already been ported just this week, I don't think this will be as big a deal as one might have thought walking out of the keynote on Monday morning.
Some take-away points for me this year:
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Version 2.0 of the .Mac SDK is hot! It's all about the collaboration. More on this later.
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Automator seems to be under-utilized. Yeah, there are over 500 actions already out in the world, but the energy level in the sessions wasn't as high as I expected. I'm wondering if it's an adverse reaction to AppleScript. Perhaps it's just too early to call.
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The Apple campus bash feels like a rock concert, with a very long line to get into the gift shop. It was cool to be where all the magic happens.
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The Rails meme has spread wider than I thought. It came up several times in hallway conversations at a Mac conference, and not once did I have to explain what it is.
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Never underestimate how much you can accomplish in a 5-minute face-to-face conversation with a client. James and I got a lot of work done this week meeting with our Rails client team every day for lunch. Just another example of rapid feedback.
This is a great developer conference!
