Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog (Archives)

Last week, Mike and I engrossed ourselves in WWDC. (Terrence was, and still is, on a vacation/family event and thus missed the whole thing. Alas!)

What a wonderful week! Of course we are under nondisclosure agreement, so I can't tell you anything else, so that's the end of this post.

OK, not really. A lot happened that wasn't under the veil of secrecy. (And what was protected isn't really a big deal - it's just the technical specifics of Snow Leopard that aren't yet public.)

The technical "curriculum" was great of course, but as many long-time attendees will readily agree, what was the most valuable was the interaction with fellow developers and engineers from Apple - in labs, in the hallway, over Twitter, over meals, and at the many parties. Compared to previous years, I feel like there were more people I wanted to chat with in person, after having connected in some way over Twitter in the last year. 140 characters is nice, but a handshake and conversation is much more memorable.

On the party scene, I especially enjoyed the sfMacIndie party on Sunday evening, put on by Chuck Soper (Whoops, I had to correct an accidentally typed "Super" there -- a very apt Freudian slip, since Chuck did a super job in almost singlehandedly organizing the event). The WebKit party was a blast as well, especially since the WebKit team members are so fun.

I talked to a lot of fellow developers about the marketing blog posts I had written just before the conference. It was nice to hear that it was appreciated. It was a bit disheartening how many indie developers are currently doing very little actively to "catch fish" (to borrow a metaphor that Daniel Jalkut used in a recent podcast). Hopefully some people will pick out a few of these suggestions and pick up some extra compensation for their hard work as programmers. (If you do, please let me know!)

Somewhat related to marketing, I was pleased to find that many developers -- including us -- are planning on going Snow Leopard in a big way. Ken Case of OmniGroup and AJ of MarketCircle mentioned they were going to start working on Snow-Leopard-only apps and updates, and we are going to be doing that as well. (Right now, Sandvox and iMedia Browser work on 10.4 and up; our next major versions will require 10.6.) With the upgrade cost from Leopard to Snow Leopard so inexpensive, it seems a no-brainer to target that version. There are so many advantages as a developer to use the modern Snow Leopard libaries. We've started digging in already and are looking forward to a day when we are no longer working on legacy systems like Tiger.

Oh, I heard that there were a bunch of iPhone developers at the conference as well as us Mac developers. :-)

All in all, a great event. Kudos to the engineers at Apple who put on such a worthwhile week!