andrew carter

After what feels like a really long week, I’m waiting in the SF airport to get home. It turned into a very weird week given all the turmoil going on with air travel. I always feel so disconnected when I travel. It’s hard to digest current events or follow my usual sources of information. At least the airport turned out much better than I expected. It’s been normal for the most part.

WWDC was a good experience. I do have to say I’m a little disappointed by the event. I think they had a much larger showing than they have before. The logistics of the event were very poor. I’m active in a developer group in Seattle called Xcoders. We had at least ten members at the conference. I think we may have recruited a few new members as well.

Here are some random thoughts on the week:

• Apple looks incredibly foolish with the amount of secrecy they put around the Mac OSX release. A friend of mine laughed at me when I told him that the sessions were under NDA. His comment - don’t they want people to develop on their platform?
• Jobs was not as impressive in person as I would have thought.
• Apple isn’t uniform in their knowledge or support for the open source community. They are good for a major commercial company but there is room for improvement. I was happy to see them create macosforge to replace OpenDarwin.
• WebKit is very cool.
• Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise at all. That’s almost an exact quote from one of the CoreData developers. That’s too bad because the server team has a great product on their hands and I bet they do care. And more than a few developers in the CoreData talks want an enterprise version of CoreData.
• There is a very vibrant independent developer community. I met several developers who were one or two man shows. It’s a nice change of pace from the usual crowd I interact with.
• Downtown SF isn’t nearly as nice as it used to be. It makes Pioneer Square seem clean
• The Apple campus felt very similar to Microsoft’s. Change the logos and you could be in either place.
• I have about 10 new apps I want to go write. Gotta pick one and do it.
• Many of the Apple presenters seemed arrogant and wouldn’t talk honestly about their products (good or bad). Perhaps not suprisingly, the guys in the core OS and in WebKit were more open.

Overall, it was worth going. There was an immense amount of information. It will be weeks before I process it all. I expected to come back more energized than ever about Mac OS X. Instead, I think I have a more balanced and realistic view. It would be a better event if Apple involved the community more. It would be useful to have talks and presentations from non-Apple engineers. I also would like to see a strong emphasis on the Unix side. Many of us came back to Mac OS X for that feature more than anything else.