Meeting Cocoa People at Macworld 2007

I'll tell you a secret if you promise not to repeat it. I had a great time at Macworld, but a I never actually stepped inside the actual Expo. I have a badge and everything, I just never made it down there. Instead, I hung out with Cocoa and Mac people.

On Thursday, I met up with Juan, Matt and Luis from Midnight Apps, and we talked about all sorts of very important, official things. There was absolutely no goofing off at any time, and we shared the secrets of our very high-tech solutions to things (it's all lies!).

In all seriousness, we hung out for a while then headed down to Blake Burris's MashPit event at Obvious Corp HQ. Blake does Cocoa Radio, so he did a quick improv interview with me then talked to the Midnight Apps guys. I'll post something when those interviews go up. This is the first time I met Blake, and he's a good guy.

I didn't realize it until Blake said something, but we were sitting in the center of all things Twitter and Odeo. Obvious Corp is like the bat cave: low-key from the outside, stunning on the inside. There was all sorts of web 2.0 fanciness going on all around us. Meanwhile, I got a tour of the new version Cha-Ching (see how I'm linking to the right place now?), and it's very slick.

CocoaHeads Meeting

A bit later on, we headed down to the Apple Store for the CocoaHeads meeting. Despite the extreme last-minuteness of everything (changing schedules twice), and following an immense Podcasting meetup, we had a great crowd. Gus Mueller, Brent Simmons and Paul Kafasis all showed up. I also sent David Chartier (of TUAW) an email and he stopped by. Mmalc stopped by as well, which balanced out our Brit-to-Yank ratio a bit.

Juan gave a great presentation, walking through all of the features and APIs that went into Cha-Ching, including Core Data, Core Image, iSight, Distributed Objects, Bonjour, iPod syncing, and so on. His enthusiam for making great software is extremely contagious, so watch out.

I also talked to a few people after Juan's presentation. I saw Tim Burks, who works on the RubyCocoa site. I also spoke to a guy (forgot your name, sorry!) who was at my TextMate talk at CocoaHeads a few months ago. He told me that since my presentation he has made the transition from a TextMate skeptic to complete convert. Awesome.

I guess everyone says it, but it really is great to put faces to the people that you otherwise only talk to on email, aim and blog comments. There are a lot more people I'd like to have met in person, but I guess that's what WWDC is for, right?

There's some great footage of Leo Laporte saying "Cha-Ching" with much enthusiam. I hope that surfaces soon.

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