Tryphoon’s Lair

For the first time ever and after many years of following the event in either real time or time delayed through the Apple site, I dragged my bum to San Francisco, to attend the Apple Word Wide Developer Conference.

First thing first, I arrived last night and was lucky enough to discover that my hotel is only a couple of minutes away from the conference. I then decided to walk there and try to get my ID for the week… When I arrived there, at 8PM sharp, I was politely told that they just closed the admissions but that I could come back today, from 7AM… Got then explained that there were way more people registered than people who could attend the keynote (almost 3 to 2) and that early arrival would be more than wise! So the evening ended up in a couple of drinks, a meal in my room and an early night!

6:00AM, I am up and getting ready and I am in the line at 6:40AM and it already goes around the building!!! At 7:00AM sharp, it starts to move, we start walking around the building. Reaching the last corner before entering the building, I bumped into a former colleague of mine from London, saving him a good half hour of queue and granting him a seat inside as well as finding me a buddy for the wait!

We finally arrive inside the building to another set of queues, from the ground floor to the first floor, around the first floor and finally at 9:30, we start moving… to reach an escalator to go to the second floor (3rd floor for my American friends). A mechanical breakdown in one of the 2 escalators gives us a little advantage and we finally make it to the keynote room, reaching the 3rd row (well, behind medias and VIPs obviously).

At 10:00 sharp, the light goes down and… there it goes. WiFi goes down (or is simply over crowded) and phones are switched off.

So what was it all about?

Well, here is the list of announcements from this year’s WWDC keynote:

• First, a stab at Microsoft using the I’m a Mac, I’m a PC guys where PC impersonates Steve Jobs and announces his resignation and the end of Apple.
• Games: EA and Id are back on board and are bringing their games to the Mac platform, without delays compared to the PC versions
• Mac OS X 10.5 preview, the 10 new major features out of 300:

1. New Desktop with translucent dock, menu bars and a new feature called stacks, that lets you pile your documents the same way I pile them on my desk.
2. New Finder, finally unified, including Coverflow browsing for files and a new remote access for file, using .Mac, called Back to my Mac
3. Quick Look: Automatic preview of any document from within the finder (any document, even video in full screen)
4. Leopard 64 bits top to bottom
5. Core animation: Oh my god… Demo of that stuff got me! Imagine the Apple TV opening sequence, except that every screen in that TV wall is lilve, active and can be flipped back and forth…
6. Boot Camp: What a shock! One thing though, Boot Camp supports Parallels and VMWare. Nothing close to what the rumour was about the Wintel platform being natively accessible from Mac OS
7. Spaces: Same as the last time it was displayed. A Unix like desktop manager. Nothing new here!
8. Dashboard: New ability to add my own widgets by simply selecting parts of web pages. That looks pretty cool.
9. iChat: New ability to share applications display or video display over iChat. Pretty interesting on the business side. Sadly, AFAIK, only with 3 users.
10. Time Machine: Automatic backup of your machine… Well, I already do this on a weekly basis but apparently, I am one of a very few people

• One more thing: Safari 3 Beta… ON WINDOWS! Hell froze over again!
• One last thing: The iPhone: No SDK for third part developers, but “you guys can build Web 2.0 apps and use Safari (3) to display them with hooks to the phone’s system… To me, this sounds more like a slap in the face of the developers… and a great way to get these phishing guys to install little pieces of codes thatphone back home using premium numbers…

And that is it…

I now left the WWDC for a quick break and am installing the preview of Leopard on my old PowerBook (hopefully, it is G4 compatible) and Safari 3 Beta on my MacBook Pro…
Next session in a couple of hours!