WWDC 2004
Sunday afternoon, I flew out to San Francisco for WWDC 2004. I didn't have a lot of spare time this year, what with KOTOR being in beta right now, but I did stay through the Tuesday sessions. Unfortunately for me, a lot of the meaty sessions were Wednesday through Friday. On the plus side, Glenda and Mark from Aspyr are there to catch those.
I met up with Richard Bannister for the first time, which was nice. We had plenty of chatting opportunities on Sunday and Monday, and I'm sure he got his fill of gossip from Aspyr. :-)
The keynote was about what I was expecting, but also in the end not really worth my time to attend. It was nice seeing the new Tiger features demoed - it looks fantastic. I had heard that starting with Tiger, Apple will be the largest user of OpenGL fragment shaders in the OS (CoreImage leans heavily on them), which indirectly is good for us. It means that all that code will be getting a pretty good shakedown by Apple, which should ultimately mean that it works really smoothly out of the box for games. That's my hope at least. :-)
I got to see Phil and Ken from Westlake, which was a lot of fun as well. It was nice to hang out with them, if only for a day. Excepting Suellen, it meant that the only "more-than-2-project" members of "old" Westlake not in attendance were Duane and John Butler, so it was a mini-reunion of sorts.
One interesting thing to note was that in years past, Apple has provided a variety of soft drinks and snacks in between sessions (free, of course). They did this year as well, but the selection was fairly different. There was a strong focus this year on healthy snacks - caffeine free Diet drinks were in abundance, and regular soft drinks were very hard to come by. Same with the snacks - you could get fruit (bananas, yuck!), goldfish and pretzels easily, but I didn't see candy bars, rice crispy treats and things like they'd had in years past. Perhaps they don't want to help slowly kill off their developers. :-)
I lived on the edge and took the subway ("bart") back to the airport from downtown. It worked out very well, and I anticipate using it in the future when I go to SFO. It only cost $5 versus $35 to take a cab, and was as clean and almost as fast.
Comments
It's always funny how people's views of the same event can vary so much. I was just reading James Duncan Davidson's blog where he had the complete opposite view of the food.
http://x180.net/Journal/Conferences/WWDC/2004/Tuesday.html
As long as there was plenty of coffee and somewhere to smoke I think I'd be okay... maybe next year!
Posted by: ben b | July 1, 2004 05:01 PM
Yeah - we're in beta too and I got pulled out of yesterday & todays courses. I did see Optimizing OpenGL yesterday, but it was the same talk John did last year but with a slight update adding in brief mention of VOBs. So you didn't miss much. Core Image talk was good though. I'm mostly bummed at missing GLSL this morning (I even skipped the bash last night). Oh well.
Another thing I'll agree on is the lame snacks & drinks. And no pinball (not that I ever played, but it is part of WWDC culture). A friend at Apple DR told me that this year Apple Corporate Events ran it rather than DR, hence missing the target audience.
Posted by: Matt Craig | July 2, 2004 11:13 AM
The problem with BART is that if you have a bunch of luggage, it's not handful.
Personally took the SFO Airporter shuttle: $14.
Posted by: Anonymous & Coward | July 5, 2004 01:43 AM