WWDC 2004: Day 4
Today was the first morning that I got to go to Moscone West as normal. Monday was the Stevenote, Tuesday was one trip to Kinko's, and Wednesday was Kinko's. I finally got a chance to grab some breakfast, but all they had were rolls and muffins and the like. What ever happened to the yogurts that they had in previous years?
The first session of the day was Service Management. The idea is that Apple's going to be creating an über-daemon to subsume the roles of StartupItems, Bootstrap Daemons (i.e. /etc/mach_init.d on Panther) and daemons like xinetd. Like yesterday's session on Spotlight, it's obvious that even though a lot of work has been done on the problem, there's still a whole bunch of work still done, and some aspects that haven't even yet been explored.
I'm very hopeful that it works out. For Baseview, since we needed a service manager and none was available (watchdog is only on OS X Server), I ended up writing one. That was very painful, and I hope I never have to do it again.
Next was Advanced Core Data Features. I missed the intro session, but I got the picture. EOF is back. Well, not quite with the full functionality, but close. It looks like a wonderful solution for almost any app that has database-like needs.
I escaped early to dump plenty of brochures all over the place. After I was done, the lunch line wasn't open, so I dropped by the O'Reilly booth. I got two "Developer's Notebook" books, both relevant to what I'm doing: one on Java 1.5 and one on Hibernate. As a bonus that I wasn't expecting, I got a copy of their history of programming languages poster. It's nifty.
At about quarter past one, I checked my email, only to find a note from Tyler saying that my rehearsal was at 1 PM. Aaargh! So I sprinted to meet up, and learned a bit about how the laptop hookup is going to go. I got nervous just being on the stage, even though no one was in the audience. I hope I do well.
The first afternoon session was on moving to HIViews. It was the first Carbon session that I've been able to attend all conference long. There wasn't anything terribly big, just the usual evolutionary stuff.
Finally was the Ten Steps to a Great Java App. Unfortunately, I knew pretty much all of the stuff there. There was the usual stuff that Apple's been insisting on for years, plus some cool JNI tricks. Nice, but not what I was looking for.
I met up with Jack and hopped a bus to Apple's campus. It was nice to see some people I hadn't seen in a while. I passed on the beer and the food, and spent most of the time indoors to cut down on the hearing damage. Two employees were doing some magic tricks, of which I could remember or figure out about a third. They were fantastic in their presentation, and if I hadn't known what to be looking for I wouldn't have had a chance.