WWDC 2006 - Day One

The first day for us students at WWDC is over, and I promised some people who aren't there to summarise. So far, we haven't heard anything that sounds like trade secrets or confidenial information, so I can just tell you what we did:

The day started with us walking over to Moscone to get our badges, wround 7:30 (badge registration opened at 7:00 that day, and the Student stuff started with breakfast at 8:00). Breakfast was great, the typical "Continental Breakfast" as US folks call it, with tea, coffee, bread, some sorts of cake... Don't expect anything overly huge, but you get a decently-sized breakfast that'll make sure you don't go hungry. This wasn't at Moscone, but rather across the street a block or so.

Then it started with Apple's Diane Wilcox giving us an intermittently funny intro speech. before we got to Brian Fitzpatrick (co-author of Subversion and the Subversion book). He's at Google now. He made fun of the editor wars ("Who uses EMACS? Who uses vi? Okay, Fight!"), and recommended we use Version Control, a Bug Tracking System, debugger ("Some people think printf() was a debugger..."), and generally explained the advantages of SVN to us. There's occasionally opportunity to ask the speakers questions.

Next was Chris Hanson from Apple, who did a talk on Unit Testing. Great, likeable guy who walked you through a few examples. In particular, he mentioned that unit testing is for specification and ensuring a bug you fixed once doesn't happen again. He also showed us that one can test Cocoa GUIs, i.e. check that targets, actions and bindings really point where they should, and that the outlets you need are actually hooked up. Lots of nice short bits about OCUnit and how it's intended to be used.

Then I discovered the Electric Sheep screen saver on the laptop of someone in front of me. Next up was Aaron Hillegass (the guy who wrote the Cocoa book), and he's starting a nice project for writing a code library for Foundation-level stuff ("unsexy code" as he put it).

Lunch. Nice, with steaks, vegetables, fried potatos and other stuff.

Grub was grabbed before Duanmu Heng and friends from Apple China. Sadly, I had a hard time understanding him (him less than his colleagues). Anyway, he seemed to touch on Quartz Composer (which is looking even awesomer than I thought), touched on localisation and that you can enter the Chinese market if you get it right and showed some nice Chinese games at MacDevCN. At least that's my guess.

Next up was Michael Johnson from Pixar, who held a very funny but still down-to earth businessman-ish speech on what he does in the Studio Tools Group. He also showed us the Ratatouille trailer and talked about some apps they have for drawing, script-pitches etc. Lots of good advice from this man.

Finally, we had Wil Shipley do a little speaking and Q&A session. We didn't have many questions, but found out he does like unit testing, just not the kind of rigid, formulaic unit testing he was forced to do at a company he'd worked for, and what his stance on patents was. No nice shirt this time, though. Just a greenish-brown DM shirt...

After that was a little break where we went for a coffee (or cocoa, as it were) into SF, and then came the career reception, which is basically a room full of tables where people from all kinds of companies are and you can talk to people from there. Some big names in there, some I'd never heard before, sadly, I spent a little too much time just chatting and thus ran out of time before I'd met all the people at all the interesting tables. There also was some more grub.

Well, it was a great first day. I can't wait to see the rest, though I probably won't be able to write about it in as much detail as this day.

Reader Comments: (RSS Feed)

Mike Zornek writes: Thanks for posting. Glad to hear all is going well.

Christian Machmeier writes: Hey! That's really great, I know someone attending WWDC in person. Now, I feel a little honored. I hope, you did take your camera with you?

Uli Kusterer replies: ★ Yup, I had my camera with me, but I didn't have much of an opportunity to take many pictures. I'll try to sift through a few eventually and maybe add them to this article or so.

Or E-Mail Uli privately.