Here’s where we separate the men from the boys. I notice that the breakfast hall is slightly emptier than it was at this time yesterday. Those who sprinted out of the gate on Monday and Tuesday are starting to feel the drag now. It’s the marathoners that will survive to the end of the show on Friday.

I did witness something humorous while eating this morning. Like cold men huddling around a fire in a trash can, I noticed knots of attendees huddled around small tables away from where the bagels and danishes were being distributed. Upon further inspection, I discovered they were toasters. There’s just something funny about watching highly skilled software developers try to decipher the $15 Black & Decker bagel toaster.

Today will involve more crowd fighting than yesterday as I will be spending four of the five sessions in the big room learning more about the iPhone. The trick today will be power. There aren’t nearly as many power outlets in this room, so I’ll have to be clever about saving power and where I sit. I’m now sitting about three rows from the front, but I’ll reposition myself before the next session to grab one of the primo power outlet seats so I can make it through the day. These events will become much easier when laptop batteries start regularly lasting more than twelve hours.

I hope to post again during the lunch break.

Wow, in retrospect, this was a really good day for getting information.

The iPhone sessions are still heavily attended. My last session of the day was just such a session and was still pretty busy even though it was about developing web applications specifically for the iPhone and not native apps, which is where all the buzz is. One way or another, everyone wants on the iPhone. The more I learn the more I want to go build software!

I took some reference photos so you all can get a sense of the size of this place. Here’s one of the larger meeting rooms other than the main room where the keynote was:

This is the crowd right after leaving that session. The Apple Design Awards are tonight, so lots of folks were hanging around to see that.

Then, I turned the corner and realized something else was going on. What were all these people milling around for?

Ah, of course. What else would cause geeks to stand around in groups?

Incidentally, this was the first hot food they’d served us all week. Now, when I turned around, there is this cool thing I’ve walked by all week. This is the network operations center for the entire conference. These guys are responsible for keeping the network up for over 5000 attendees and the employees. That includes a whole raft of wireless hubs, wired hubs, and whatnot.

They have these screens set up just to look pretty and tell you stats about the network as it goes. That’s live data updating constantly.

This is looking out of the second floor:

This is the Yerba Buena Gardens across the street from the convention center:

Finally, here’s the ground floor as I left tonight and the sidewalk outside:

So, I’m well over the hump now. I’ll have a fairly full day tomorrow and just two morning sessions on Friday. There is a third session after lunch, but none of them look terribly interesting. I may even try to get an earlier flight home if I can do it on the cheap.

Onward!

There are three session blocks after lunch every day, here, but that middle block didn’t really have any interesting sessions today (besides, we get access to videos of all the sessions after the show). So, I took a break to head for the iPhone Lab to see if I could corral an Apple engineer and ask some specific developer questions about how to code up some of these apps. It turned out that I got him for over half an hour and got some good information about good design patterns and UI decisions for our apps. Well worth it!

I’m now waiting outside my last session of the day which is a bit of a departure for me. It’s about using Dashcode to build web applications for the iPhone. I’ve never used Dashcode before, but it’s a tool that Apple provides to make web app development easier. I’m eager to see what it’s like and how useful it is.

Oh, and here are those pictures from this morning’s iPhone session. They are all still pretty busy and generate a line for each session.

Over halfway done!

Well my first session may have been empty, but the next session was another iPhone session and it was packed again. I’ll post pictures later. That session spent more time on working with views, controls, and animations on the iPhone. Some very cool stuff is available to developers like me and I’m looking forward to using it!

I had planned to go talk to the Interface Design Lab about getting some direction for future apps for both Inspiration and Smart Box, but they were taking appointments and were already booked up for the rest of the week. So, I’m on a waiting list in case they can bring more folks in to help. Darn!

Instead, I sat in on the lunch talk that was given by the head of the internal tools department at Pixar. It was entertaining to see how their process works and how important software development is for their workflow (it’s more than just the rendering). Most impressive were the tools they built only for internal users including a Web 2.0 app for the art asset management that was very sharp, snappy and impressive.

It’s always humbling to see good artists at work whether they’re animating fish and rats or building cool software. Very cool. Too bad Pixar is in California.

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…

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.