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Comment on "In Defense of WWDC 2006"
by Al — Aug 31
It was my first time attending WWDC. Yes, it was technically excellent, but, even as a first time attendee, I was disappointed with a few things.

- There seemed to be poor planning regarding room sizes for many of the IT sessions. There are two or three I wasn't allowed into because of overcrowding. Lots of people were upset, since that's why the paid to be there.

- I've seen the swag from past WWDCs and this year's certainly wasn't even close. Even the official WWDC t-shirt was lame. You just expect better from Apple.

- The Apple campus party was mostly a waste of time. What's the point of going there if all we can do is hang out in the courtyard or wait in for at least an hour to get into the company store? While the company store is similar to Apple's regular retail stores, it has Apple logo merchandise (t-shirts, jackets, pens, mugs, etc.) that you can't buy anywhere else. It would be make far more sense to have this stuff brought to the 'flagship' store a few blocks from Moscone, where WWDC attendees could buy this stuff without having to stand in a very long line.

- The food for vegetarians and vegans (which I'm one) was worse than for other people. Note to Apple: it's not hard to provide a balanced meal for non-meat eaters, but there clearly was no effort to do that. Vegetarians need protein too--not just carbs in the form of salad and pasta.

- A personal pet peeve, though shared with many of my fellow attendees: there was virtually no Coke to be had. Other than for some Diet Coke occasionally and the far more rare regular Coke, there was an absence of the major reason why most coding and IT work gets done in the first place.

- Except for Madisonline's charging station (a personal life saver for me), there were no third parties to be seen.

- It would have been great to hear from VPs and upper management in other than canned demos.

- Not having hardcopy of the new sessions that were added after the Stevenote was pretty lame.

- The labs were great, but the scheduling system were engineer's names and area of expertise on a white board. There were people who were upset because it was hard to locate the engineer you really needed to talk to. With the infrastructure that was already onsite, you would expect that something better could have been implemented.
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