WWDC 2010
I’m writing this in a cab on the way to SFO, the Saturday after this year’s WWDC.
I am stunned at the energy of this event. Apple has introduced the biggest advance since the original iPhone while gracefully deflating Gizmodo’s “exposé” at the same time, Apple employees have been working their asses off preparing for this event, striving to bring the development community up to speed on how to use their tools to make amazing apps. They’ve also made it clear that the development community really matters to them: spending time with us socially, fielding questions about things that might not have been covered in the sessions, and generally being amazing.
Likewise, the attendees play a major role in this as well, because it is a Apple-specific monoculture. Everyone, whether they are competing with you or not, even the jailbreakers, are there because they are all excited about the platform and looking for ways to do amazing things with it.
This year had an app to bring to the UI labs, and we got some great feedback on how to make Bistromath even better. Bil and I got some time, despite a heavy workload, to get exposed to a lot new technologies. Both of us have seen how things like Grand Central Dispatch can not only improve the performance of some of the applications we’ve developed, while also significantly decreasing the size and complexity of the codebase as well.
Yesterday afternoon I went back to the hotel and thought. I spent from about 3:30 to 9 just trying to wrap my head around everything I had seen, playing with the new Xcode 4 preview (which is fucking amazing, btw), and just trying to get a sense of what it meant to us, and how we could incorporate and leverage everything that we’d been given.
I felt a little bemused, in the way that Douglas Adams felt after listening to new Beatles albums for the first time: I know that I’m witnessing something huge, but still struggling to get my head around all of what I am experiencing.
A big thanks to Michael Jurewitz, Matt Drance, Bill Bumgarner, Mike Lee, Marcus Zarra, David Barnard, John Gruber, Michael Lopp, Tim Woods, Joel Page, Dave Wiskus, Kris Markel, Paul Goracke, Jeremy Foo, Joseph Agreda, and everyone else that made this week so amazing.
-Daniel
P.S. If you’re feeling a little lost in Xcode 4, make sure that you read the “Xcode 4 Transition Guide” under the Help menu.
