WWDC is Coming to a Close

Well I have been asked to post so here goes. The one thing I can really say about WWDC is that it is very tiring, but it is very informational. I’d like to come back again next year, but I need to remember to bring a case of RedBull with me. There is really no caffeine served, besides coffee and I really don’t drink that. Going from 9am till 6pm daily gets very tiring. Tuesday went to 10:30 though.

• Monday - The first day of the conference. This starts off with the big keynote with Steve Jobs. With so many people here all the students were forced into a room with a TV stream, and they didn’t allow us into the room till after the keynote had started. It was fine with missing it. I ended up meeting a guy from Lafayette. I also met a guy from UMass who was in the Bioinformatics class I took, it was a collaborative class between LSUS and UMass. Later that night I went to the baseball game. I got to see Barry Bonds hit #747. Pretty cool game, and a very nice ballpark.
• Tuesday - This was the day of our first “real” sessions. It started at 9am where I went to Session 203 Coding Smarter With Objective-C 2.0. Then at 10:30 I went to Session 401 Creating Leading-edge 2D Graphics with Quartz. After that it was lunch till 2pm. At 2pm I went to Session 402 Understanding the Architecture of Core Audio. At 3:30pm I was at Session 210 Building Animated Cocoa User Interfaces, then at 5pm I went to Session 211 Adding Core Animation to Your Application. After this we went down to the second floor for pizza. It was nuts to watch 5,000 people rush into the pizza tables. The waiters were just throwing pizza on the table and it was gone in a matter or seconds. Then it was a big rush to get to the Apple Design Awards where developers are recognized for there applications that make use of great features and that people love to use. After that it was Stump the Experts, this is where the crowd asks obscure questions to experts. Nobody wins or loses but it is a very funny session.
• Wednesday - Went to Session 305 Xcode 3.0: The New Development Workflow at 10:30, then back to the hotel to crash till the next session at 2pm. I went to Session 306 Interface Builder 3.0: Creating an Interface from Start to Finish, which was probably my favorite session so far. At 3:30 I was at Session 309 Getting Started with Xray, which is Apple’s new performance analysis tool.
• Thursday - Ended up sleeping in and missing the 9am sessions. Really wanted to go to the OpenGL Shading Language session. So when I got to the conference at 10:30 I went to Session 140 Developing Cocoa Applications with Python and Ruby. Then had a 2 hour break before the 2pm sessions started, where I went to Session 202 Broadcast Your Application’s Content with iChat Theater. This was probably my second favorite session, and it’s actually quite simple. At 3:30 off to Session 221 Handling Images with the Image Kit, another favorite of mine. To end the day it was Session 222 Using Advanced Objective-C 2.0 Features. Decided to skip the WWDC Bash tonight to get some rest so I will be better prepared for being awake all day till my flight out a little after midnight. Really wish I could have gone, but I need sleep as I probably won’t get any for 36 hours.

I love it, and hope I can make it back next year. I have gotten a lot out of it. The weather here has been awesome, if only it was half way like this back home. I just know next year I will be better prepared when it comes to sleep though.