WWDC 2006 - Campus Bash

I know, I know, it's been rather quiet in this place. The thing is, most of WWDC is under Non-Disclosure agreement, which means I can't talk about all the new stuff they showed us here. I can provide my opinion on the stuff that was publically announced in the keynote, though. For instance, Xcode 3 will absolutely rock. How much? Well, shortly after the session where they first told us more details about the next generation of our dev tool, I started receiving e-mails from the bug reporter guys, telling me to confirm they'd fixed my bugs. They're going to fix pretty much every bug and feature request I filed against this thing since Project Builder in 2003...

Well, anyway, something I can actually talk about in any useful detail is people I met and hung around with in recent days. Among them was Bill Monk, a man that helped me out back when I was starting out in programming back on CompuServe so many times I can hardly count them.

I also met Mark Lucas, the man responsible for keeping SuperCard alive. He was fighting a terrible cold the first day, but was still fun to be around. You should have seen that guy hacking away at his code. That man certanly loves his product and the work he's doing in a way I've rarely seen. If you were unsure about SuperCard because it was invented so far back and changed hands so many times and is being maintained by a company you never heard of -- well, forget about all that. This programmer here has plans for SC that'll knock your socks off, and he's tickling every ounce of performance out of it. The Universal release will be glorious, and it only gets better from there.

Mark was hanging out with George Warner from Apple (as cool and likeable in real life as he comes across on the lists) and Chilton Webb. For those of you who may not know him, Chilton is not only the firefighter companies go to to get their apps brought over from Classic or Windows in a flash, he's also the guy to write the largest number of mind-bogglingly power- and useful extensions for SuperCard. What Rinaldi "the XCMD factory" was for HyperCard, Chilton is that for SC.

And via Mark Lucas I got to meet John Turnipseed, another cool guy of the Mac software business.

I also got in my GUI review, and got it done by John Geleynse himself, who's kind of a show star at WWDC not just because he's the host at the Apple Design awards (Lineform won "Best Student Product" and Boinx were runners-up for "Best OS X User Experience", congrats!). He's just so easy-going around people.

Andrew Pontious was in a session too, and he's coding away like crazy on Apple stuff either he or I can't talk about (yet). He actually got to present his work to us guys at WWDC, and boy were we developers happy about what's coming. Funny demo, too, called "Get a Room" :-)

And yesterday at the Campus Bash was big fun. It's a bit of a drive out to Cupertino, but they had music (sort of house/techno-ish), nice food (burrito wraps), drinks (beer, wine, bubbly, soda), ice cream for dessert and Apple engineers at every corner. Every group of engineers had their own colour, and shirts and buttons in matching colours. Bill Monk was hanging out with Joseph Maurer, the man who made sure all those Quickdraw apps could be ported to OS X. Great guy to talk to. I've heard a nice bit about how the NeXT takeover and similar things happened from his perspective inside Apple.

And during that, I also ran into Doug Simons. I saw him and noticed he was wearing an Eggplant button, so I stopped him and found out who he was (embarrassing myself along the way because my mind completely blanked on his name). He'd actually spoken at a session on software testing, which is what his app is for, after all. Doug used to be the architect of HyperSense, a NeXT application a lot like HyperCard. HyperSense's language a while ago made it into Eggplant, and we'd e-mailed back and forth a couple of times.

We talked about xTalks, our plans and ideas for future programming languages and of course also of xTalks past. It was a really great experience.

If there's two things I can recommend about WWDC, it's that you should try to meet as many people as you can there, and that you should go to any Lab that makes sense for your application. And if you still have time, take all the sessions you can.

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Ruth Less writes: And then eat all the burritos and ice cream you can!!! I like the concept. I would have done the same at JavaOne but employees can't go to e.g. hands-on labs because they obviously are for the paying customers. Maybe I should have asked whether they'd let me stand silently in a corner and stare and listen. Just to freak out the developers. Muhahahaha. ;-) One definitely needs some kind of priority plan at these conferences, they offer so much, and it also takes hooouuurs to walk from one presentation room to another, better be prepared.

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