andrew carter

I’m waiting in the airport to head out to San Francisco for WWDC 2007 (ok - I started the post in the airport and sent it from the hotel). The good news is that this year, I’m getting paid to go. The other big difference is that the stuff I’ll learn at WWDC will directly impact my job unlike last year when Mac dev was a hobby.

Looking over the sessions, I see some repeats from last year but lots of new stuff and lots of TBD to be filled in tomorrow. I’ll probably look at Leopard server much more than last year. At RogueSheep, we’ve been looking at some solutions for clients that could potentially benefit from Leopard server (and some of Adobe’s server software as well). Plus, I’m really excited to see an out of the box server OS that is setup with Ruby on Rails. It’s not hard on OS X or Linux right now but it could save me some time if I can throw on a Leopard image and be up and running with the stack ready to go. I hope that they have also updated to at least MySQL 5.0.

The week should be busy like last year. Brent Simmons and NewsGator will be hosting a party on Monday night. Gus Mueller will champion the indie developer along with Wil Shipley at a special CocoaHeads round table at the downtown Apple store.

As for the keynote tomorrow, here’s what I’m expecting to hear:

• Release date for Leopard
• Major push for ZFS. Maybe not the default but widely supported even on client.
• Major update to Boot Camp functionality. Maybe a soft hibernate feature that lets you freeze the state of one OS and switch to the other without a full reboot? Would make Boot Camp better but still leave plenty of room for VMWare to provide the side-by-side integration.
• iPhone development kit. I don’t think Apple really was ever going to lock out developers from iPhone. I just think they needed to get it done and decide how much to open it up. Plus, releasing an iPhone SDK this week would continue to kick up the iPhone hype (as if it needs it).

My outlandish dream announcements:

• Some sort of killer WINE integration that lets Windows apps run like X11 apps do now.
• Virutalization of OS X itself (either through Apple or VMWare)
• No cattle herding of developers at the conference
• Good food

I’m generally a satisfied OS X user. Nearly all of my wishes are around interoperability or virtualization since those are the worlds I live in. I have more wishes for apps like iTunes than the OS X itself.

As usual, I likely won’t be able to talk about it anyway since it is under NDA. But that didn’t stop info from being leaked last year. There is also much less incentive to keep anything under wraps since Vista has already released and isn’t threatening anything.