WWDC 2003
Welcome to San Francisco. Where the skateboarding kids wear CodeWarrior T-shirts and even the homeless have piercings. I went because Apple decided to go and change the date of their developer conference, and with it came a move to the Moscone Center.
Sunday afternoon was our flight out ("our" being Doug, a coworker of mine, and mine). The plane left on time and we got into SFO late afternoon, bordering on evening. We checked into the Mosser.
Now, the Mosser Hotel is a curious place. From the URL alone you can see that it's a "Victorian hotel". I haven't a clue what that's supposed to mean. I can tell you what it means in practice. First, there are public restrooms and a public bath room (literally, a room with a bath) on every floor. Thank goodness each room also has a private bath. Secondly, the rooms are small. Take a queen-size bed, and drop it in a room where there's three feet of space to the bed's left, three feet of space to the bed's right, and three feet of space to its foot. That's it. The sink's in the bedroom since there's not enough space in the bathroom (which only has twice the floor-space of the tub it contains). And finally, there's no air conditioning. The building is U-shaped, so I can look out the window at a brick wall, and have no chance of an actual breeze come in the window. Couple that with the record highs, and you have wonderful sweaty nights.
We went wandering to the Moscone Center to check in. Apple actually had Moscone West, which is a small annex to the actual Moscone North and South, but is still incredibly huge. We registered, got our bags and tags and left.
[By the way, I'm going to be talking about sessions now, but, for all you NDA freaks out there, know that nothing I say is going to reveal more than is or was public knowledge.]
Keynote
Steve finally got to listing some features. A huge one for me is support for IPSec-based VPNs. Currently Jaguar does PPTP, but that's evil Microsoft junk. Baseview's setting up an IPSec VPN, and having the system support it rather than having to chase down some third-party app would be helpful.
The move from "computer-centric" to "user-centric"? Blah. Whatever. The good thing is that clicking the toolbar pill gets rid of that column thing to the left of the window, leaving a window that closely resembles that of today's Finder. Well, except for the metal. I'm sure someone will make a patch to fix that.
Action button: For those who can't control-click.
Labels: Aloha! I'm a happy camper. See, Steve? Metadata good...
New open/save panels: About time! I'm quite exhausted of the column view ones.
iDisk: Apple's now admitting it's slow, so the iDisk is now an area set aside in your home directory, and files dropped in there are auto-synched to your real iDisk. If you actually use the iDisk much, that's good news.
Exposé: An elegant, gorgeous band-aid over the real problems of window management. Unfortunately, I can't think of a much better way to handle it.
FileVault: Encrypted disc image for a home directory. Doesn't everyone already have an encrypted disc image for their sensitive files?
Mail: Blah. Thread view is nice, though.
Pixlet: Can anyone say, "Windows Media 9 competitor"? I knew you could. This deserves lots of media coverage and has gotten none so far.
Built-in PostScript -> PDF converter: Major feature for me. I like it. How much is Adobe charging Apple?
Fast user switching: A note from Microsoft's playbook.
Font Book: Chomp, chomp. (Holy merging cow, Batman!)
iChat AV: More of the same. It has "group" support now, although all that means is turning on and off groups of your buddies. Not at all what I wanted. Video/audio chat is nifty, though.
iSight: Cute. It's supposed to be auto-focus, and I've seen it focus on a printed sheet of paper, but it seems to refuse to focus on my face.
XCode: "We're still slower than CodeWarrior, but we can make it up by throwing a few XServes as a compile farm at the problem!"
Tuesday
Bluetooth Update: Didn't follow a thing. New APIs and such, but I'm just a user. Finding out that there are two different kinds of communication APIs (L2CAP and RFCOMM) was too much for me.
PowerMac G5 Architecture Overview: Mmmmm. G5. Nice in-depth look at something you can't get your hands on.
Lunch: Look on the net and find that most of the contact info for shuls in the area is old and out of date. Chide myself for not making plans earlier. Leave a message on a machine for a place for Shabbos.
Unicode: I ♥ Unicode.
WebObjects and J2EE: JBoss! Official and supported. Ties in nicely with some of the stuff we're doing.
Authentication: Kerberos.
Apple Design Awards: I felt it wouldn't be just if Hydra didn't win. It did.
Wednesday
Java Apps: This was against the HIToolbox session, which I desperately wanted to attend. Oh, well, that's what the DVD set is for. Some interesting stuff, though not much more than you could get from Apple's Java documentation.
Safari and Web Standards: Deeper into Safari, though I'd missed the session describing the WebKit API.
Enterprise App Deployment: More of the JBoss love-fest.
Tuning software: Panther has some incredibly nifty new tools. There's also a new version of the CHUD tools out. Saturn is slick.
Stump the Experts: I knew some of the questions that were asked of the panel ("What Carbon API ignores all of its parameters?" "How do you generate the Dr. Seuss illustration hidden in OS X?") but couldn't come up with any good ones of my own.
Movie: Finding Nemo—what else?
Thursday
Quartz 2D: Quartz is getting even more powerful in Panther. Some of the new features definitely rate a "wow".
Carbon Data Exchange: There's a new pasteboard in town, new translation services, and a new "Uniform Type Identification" architecture that finally brings some order to the type chaos.
Lunch: Start panicking about Shabbos. Get a call returning the message that I left. They said that I can eat there, but they had nowhere to keep me. Not good. I skipped the remaining two sessions, hopped a bus for the other side of town, and got some salami, rolls, grape juice, and tea lights.
Beer Bash: Had a beer. The band was decent, though not really my style. I find myself rating music nowadays by a rather odd criteria. I have respect for it if I couldn't easily duplicate it with 30 minutes and Soundtrack.
Friday
Debugging Carbon Apps: The new XCode works with Carbon apps. Good to know. That and this.
Software Testing Tools: Some Apple stuff, but mostly a show of a third-party tool called Eggplant. Yawn.
SearchKit: Puke. We've used AIAT before at Baseview, and Apple screwed us badly. The session was content-free (not a single API mention), and the Q&A easily ran longer than they talked. I took the mike and hit them with one question after another about whether its glacial performance had improved or its handling of large quantities of files had gotten any better. The answer? It still sucks.
Java Performance: Some hints on how to not be so slow.
Ink: A decent amount of stuff coming for Panther, and cool too. I stepped up to the mike to ask a question about their API. "Avi Drissman, old Newton hack. Glad to see Rosetta up and running again." Larry Yaeger seemed startled by my mention of the name.
That was it. On the way back to the hotel I stopped by a hardware store and bought a lighter for the candles. At candle-lighting time, I placed the candles on the windowsill, tried hard to make the lighter work, and it shot out of my hand and flew out of the window. So much for that. I davened Ma'ariv out on the fire escape (much cooler than my room), made Kiddush, went walking for a few blocks, and went to bed.
Shabbos
Shacharis on the fire escape, afternoon meal, then went walking. The Mosser is on 4th Street, so I crossed Market, and walked up Stockton. I got up to Chinatown (past Sacramento) and realized that anywhere would be too far. So I started walking back, and turned left at Market. Took Market all the way to the water. Apparently the Embarcadero (the street along the water) used to be a freeway, which is a shame. They had to tear it down because of the earthquake, and now they're renovating the port building. I walked back, passed out on the bed, and woke up for Mincha and Ma'ariv.
Sunday
Flew back too early in the morning.
Overall, I had a great time. I learned a lot, but I'm still glad to be back home.
Comments
What are the answers to those two Stump the Experts questions? I'm afraid I don't know either of them....
Posted by: Eric | June 30, 2003 11:17 PM