If this were a baseball season, today would be the dog days of summer. The sessions are all about very detailed things, so they are less glamorous and even more difficult to wrap your head around.

I was up a little later this morning, but made it in with time to grab a scone and some juice before my first session. This was my first non-iPhone session since the grand overviews on Monday. There were probably fewer than 40 people in attendance. Even more interestingly, all three of the presenters had French accents of varying thickness. Fortunately, they had good slides so I was able to follow along fairly well.

I’m also hoping to stop into a UI design lab later to ask some questions about future products for Inspiration and Smart Box Design. That will be during the lunch break so it will depend entirely on how fast I can get food and get out of the dining hall.

I better get in line for the next session. It’s another one in the big hall!

Well, that was dense! I figured I’d been doing pretty well yesterday and this morning, but I had some very fast talkers in the last couple of sessions. It challenged my typing skills to keep up. Whew! Still, it wasn’t because they were poor presenters, but because they had so much to present. I completely understand why they went that fast. There was lots to hear.

I think I’m finally getting my head around some fundamental development ideas when writing code for the iPhone. The more demo code I see, the more it makes sense how it all works. They do have lab times here when you can go ask the Apple engineers one-on-one questions about your particular problem. The downside is that those labs are during the session times, so I either have to punt on a session or eat a fast lunch to jump into the lab during the long lunch break. Hmm, a dilemma confronts me.

Here’s a couple more shots from my seat before some of the afternoon sessions. I think that’s the closest I’ve been to the stage so far! Oh, and you may be interested to note that the fine print on the projection screen says “These sessions are confidential. No video or photographs please.” It’s okay. I haven’t been arrested, yet…

Two days down, two and half days left…

So, apparently the reality is somewhere between what I had hoped and what I had feared. The sessions have not been quite as crazy as yesterday, but the big ones were certainly more crowded that I remember them ever being during my last trip here. This is the line to get into the second iPhone session this morning and this wasn’t even in the big room!

During lunch, I chatted for a few minutes with a couple of guys from Fog Creek Software (this happens to be the home of Joel from Joel on Software fame). Sounds like a great place to work even if it’s in New York City. After that, I found a place to sit and catch up on email and write these entries. Here’s a few more pictures of the open areas available for folks to hang out and plug in. Power outlets are really at a premium this year. If there’s a knot of people somewhere, it’s likely they found a power strip.

 

More iPhone for the afternoon and, hopefully, some more questions answered.

The change of pace is dramatic. Yesterday, I was standing in the dining area with a few thousand other folks waiting to get into the keynote. This morning, the area is filled with sparsely populated tables with folks checking email, eating bagels and pastries, and generally hanging out before our first session in thirty minutes. I have a table to myself as I type this.

I slept a half hour longer this morning and I didn’t have to line up outside the convention center. I much prefer this pace and, thankfully, this will be the pace for the rest of the week.

Interestingly, as I walked into the dining area, I noticed something I have never seen at WWDC before: The Company Store. They have cordoned off a small area to sell some Apple T-shirts, polos, jackets, etc. Some of the items are WWDC 2008 specific. For those who attend with car rentals, it’s common to make a pilgrimage to Cupertino and Apple’s offices where the real Company Store is to buy souvenirs and other goodies you can’t get anywhere else. Bringing a taste of that to the show itself is a bright idea. The temporary store is hopping as I type.

Today will be about drilling down into the overviews we got yesterday. By a chance of fate, I will be attending nothing but iPhone specific sessions today. Most of them about specific areas of development, but one about the details of the process in getting an app distributed by Apple’s App Store.

Today I take off the water wings and dive for the deep end!

For those of you unaware of the usual order of things on day one, my afternoon consisted of three more sessions:

• Mac OS X State of the Union
• Developer Tools State of the Union
• Graphics & Media State of the Union

Probably the most interesting report from these was the first look into the next release of Mac OS X codenamed Snow Leopard. The reason for the similar sounding name is because they aren’t aiming at adding a huge swath of features, but significantly improving the stability, performance, and other maintenance. The biggest user visible feature was really aimed at the corporate environment. Mac apps like Mail, iCal, and the Address Book, will be able to talk directly to Microsoft Exchange servers which makes them more welcome in those enterprise environments.

I do have to geek out for a bit, though, to tell you the tale of my afternoon. I had lunch with a friend on the bottom floor and then headed back up for the afternoon sessions (all in the same room). I didn’t find anyone I knew, so I was on my own. I had not found power and foolishly ran my laptop down to under 40 minutes of battery during lunch. So, I cranked down all of the settings and tried to ride out the session in low power mode while I took notes.

About halfway through, the battery gave up. Being a clever boy, though, I pulled out my iPod Touch (which is basically an iPhone without the phone features) and started taking notes on that. When the session was over, I emailed them back to myself so I could incorporate them with the ones I had started. So, in one fell swoop, I shook my fist at technology for having batteries that run out and then celebrated technology for giving me a handheld device that I could type fast enough on to take notes and with a decent email client I used to get the notes back to my laptop. Such fun.

For the last two sessions, I spotted the slightly raised platform along the left edge of the hall that had been holding the prodigious press attendees during the keynote. It was empty now, but it still had power outlets. I plugged in and camped out. However, my rear end suffered as the platforms were quite hard. Ouch.

Anyway, on to more sessions about iPhone development tomorrow. Maybe a little more sane seating, too, as the number of sessions at the same slot increased radically for the rest of the week.

On to day two!

Well, that was exciting!

I ended up about two-thirds of the way back in the center section of the main hall. Here are some shots from where I was.

 

And we had a special guest in attendance.

So, the big announcements were the cheaper iPhone 3G and mobileme. The big deal with this is a faster data network when using it over the cellular network and a built-in GPS all for half the price. The 8GB iPhone 3G will only be $199, which is about half price as last week. Very nice!

They also added something called mobileme that is a replacement for the .mac service that Apple has been offering for a few years. The cool thing about mobileme is a total synchronization between your iPhone and your desktop application. This could be a very nice upgrade for folks like me who try to keep calendars and contacts in sync across multiple computers.

I’m sure you can read better reviews of the keynote than mine, but feel free to ask questions in the comments and I’ll answer as I can. My blogging for the rest of the week will be more about the experience and the people rather than the sessions since I’m under NDA for that.

I’ll update more pictures as I can!

… but I had time to take a picture of me.

Let me start off by saying my hotel leaves a little to be desired. It has a very nice HDTV that stretches all the non-HD channels. It has a nice shower, which was unexpected. The bed is decent, too. However, I had hoped that after charging me so much for a room, Internet access would be a throw-in. Evidently not. It’ll work, though.

My morning started in a fun way. I got up early figuring I wouldn’t be the first in line, but that I may get a decent head start on the large crowd. While watching the news hoping to get a weather update, they cut to a reporter standing outside the convention center I was about to walk to. He was describing the huge crowds and the video showed a line out the door and around the corner! I panicked and finished packing my backpack and ran out the door.

When I arrived, the line wasn’t just out the door. It was around the corner and down the alley. But, in the best Disney style, they managed the line well. After checking in and getting a spiffy T-shirt and nice laptop bag, they kept us moving and corralled us all into the dining area on the ground floor (the keynote will be on the third floor). After milling around for a few minutes, that area filled up (I heard one guy describe it as “pre-buffering”) and they guided us back out and up the first set of escalators. We’ve now been shuffled down a hallway on the second floor and we’ve been waiting here for twenty or thirty minutes. About half the crowd has succumbed to the large backpacks and they sit and type as I am. Some hold a laptop in one hand and type with the other as they continue to stand. Combine that with a backpack, and I’m sure some chiropractor somewhere will be happy.

 

 

I’m always amazed at how I run into people here. I actually spotted one guy I know, but don’t like very much, so I had to melt into the crowd the other direction. Better, though, was spotting one guy I was attempting to meet about ten feet ahead of me as we shuffled out of the dining area. At least I have someone to talk to now.

I’m optimistic that I’ll get into the main hall for the keynote, but I won’t know until I’m sitting in the room.

More later…

Well, it begins.

I’m sitting at gate C3 waiting for my plane to San Francisco. I’m on my way to WWDC (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference). This is a weeklong conference for software and hardware developers that work with any Apple hardware and software. When I went two years ago, there were about 5000 attendees, but this is the first year that they’ve sold out. I’m expecting it to be a bit more crowded.

While I’d love to give you all the gory details of what I’m hearing, I’m under NDA for all of the conference content other than the keynote address Monday morning. That is always exciting, though, as Steve Jobs usually has something new and slightly unexpected to announce and excite the developers. The announcements are interesting as is the response of the developers in attendance.

I’m going to learn new things and see how I can leverage what Apple is offering for two companies. Inspiration Software (my day job) is paying my way and has encouraged me to learn about everything as we evaluate our options for future deployment. Smart Box Design (my side job) is focused on casual games for handheld devices, so I’m clearly going to be interested in the iPhone developer track for them.

I’m hoping to blog a bit when I can for those who are interested. Maybe even throw in a picture or two that won’t break my NDA.

Hope this turns out to be fun for whoever is reading!

This is just an update to another mailing list/website I’m responsible for: The Daily Push Up. I’ve taglined this as “A daily dose of spiritual exercise for men in various stages of their Christian walk”. Up until now, this has been a mailing list where I or my dad have written short devotionals that are mailed out each day.

Now, there is a web page that will be listing each devotional along with other notes that we may decide to add. If you are of the RSS bent, you can now subscribe that way rather than via email. You are welcome to comment there and, maybe, even engage in a little discussion if you so choose. So, please visit Daily Push Up and enjoy.