WWDC 2007 Day One
This has been an interesting day. The single biggest difference I notice this year is that there are a lot of new people. A lot. Last year I could look across a room and recognize two or three people. This year, it's a sea of brand new faces.Ultimately, I'm thrilled that so many want to develop for Apple platforms — and that they're willing to travel so far to learn how to do it. But it's certainly a little surreal. It's the beginning of a new possibility.
I'm really enjoying meeting a number of people I hadn't previously met in person. Daniel Jalkut and I have been "blog neighbors" for a while, but didn't actually meet in real life until today. Also met a number of others that I either just knew through email and blogs, or I knew their work and not them personally.
There really is something pretty incredible that happens when you meet other people who do the same sort of work you do. Software development is a fairly specialized thing. We live in a world where being a software engineer has no distinction from being a "computer person," so it's difficult to find an audience to understands the excitement of, say, coming up with an interesting CoreImage filter.
You have that audience here. It's even more exciting to hear how others use the work you've done in their own efforts.
Today was essentially a warm-up day. I went to the keynote, Mac OS X State of the Union, and the Graphics and Media State of the Union. I also went to session 103, Students: Getting the Most out of WWDC, which was a nice surprise. The aim was to orient new developers (to the Mac or in general) in WWDC and software development in general. For some, I'm sure it makes WWDC seem like a much warmer experience.
A few of us stopped by Buzz's party first. Daniel tried to introduce me to Buzz, but we couldn't track him down. Gus Mueller showed me something he's been working on, and I gave way too much feedback. But seriously, it's good stuff.
We then went to the TUAW part for a bit, and I met Scotty McNulty — another neighbor of sorts. Unfortunately, it was a bit loud to have a real conversation (sorry Scott!), but I tried to convey how much I appreciate TUAW's approach to things.
Talked to a lot more folks, but there's only so much time.
It's been an exciting week so far. I'm very thankful to be here with so many great people. I think I'm supposed to tell everyone to come to the Coding Smarter with Objective-C 2.0 session tomorrow morning (in 7.5 hours), so there's that. But save me a seat.
WWDC 2007 Day One
Posted Jun 12, 2007 — 14 comments below
Posted Jun 12, 2007 — 14 comments below
Brian Amerige — Jun 12, 07 4317
I'm interested to hear what the general reaction of developers at WWDC is to the UI move in 10.5.
Initially I saw it as problematic for developers with unified apps, but with a night of sleep it doesn't seem quite as bad anymore.
Thoughts?
Chinmoy — Jun 12, 07 4318
Aaron Tait — Jun 12, 07 4319
As a developer I am gonna weigh in on your question Brian; the unified look is nothing but good news for developers. It takes a lot of work/hacking to make a UI that looks similar to the iLife theme or Mail. That being said, it also makes more sense from a user's perspective to have a consistent and beautiful UI.
Jonas Greitemann — Jun 12, 07 4321
How is the atmosphere over there? I hear a lot of negative feedback on the keynote. (10 features, 6 known...) What's your opinion as you watched the keynote in person.
Do you already had hands on Leopard? How does it feel? I hope it's not as buggy as Safari on Windows. ;-)
I hope you'll enjoy the rest of WWDC, too.
Brian Amerige — Jun 12, 07 4323
Hmm, well, I believe we're both using different definitions of the "unified" term. While I agree that it's great that there is only one UI now (which is probably what you thought I meant by "unified"), developers who used the Mail-style UI (which is commonly referred to as "unified" as well) face a bit of a problem as well, things just look a tad awkward.
To elaborate, take something like Coda, for example. How do you think it looks when you transform the light-plastic to dark-gray that we see in 10.5? As I said, initially as I was annoyed because I thought it looked horrific --- and therefore, would make any app which is currently light-plastic as it is horrific looking as well. I'm continuing to adjust to it, but I'm interested to hear what other developers think as far as the actual aesthetics of it. Things like iTunes look great in the dark-gray, but what about Mail, and in the same way, apps like Coda?
Elliott Harris — Jun 12, 07 4325
So far, WWDC has been crazy, and its been a lot of fun getting to meet so many people that use your products and whose products you use. Between all the people, it definitely gets crazy.
It was nice to meet you Scott, hope to see you and a whole bunch of other people around this week.
Eric — Jun 12, 07 4327
Oskar Lissheim-Boethius — Jun 12, 07 4328
I actually was really concerned in the beginning, but the new interface really starts growing on me.
The dock reflections are just plain silly, but the transparent menubar and the darker theme is nice. I guess the gray toolbars could be a tad lighter, though.
And I don't think I'm breaking the NDA by mentioning that the new Finder is... very nice :)
The iPhone 3d party "apps" however...
Scott Stevenson — Jun 12, 07 4329
I'm not sure what you're asking. The UI landscape an app lives in is constantly fluctuating. Personally, I think that's a good thing, but good or bad is somewhat irrelevant. Tastes and styles change over time, and part of being a software developer is being aware of that.
In my opinion, it's important to move forward with new ideas in UI or things get stale and users won't see any need to upgrade. I know a lot of developers think that features and lower-level improvements sell software, but it's just not true in the consumer or small business space. User want to see that things have changed. The enterprise space is different, of course.
In my experience, "unified" means the unified toolbar and window title look, possibly with a darker shade of gray. I haven't seen it used to describe the Mail look as a whole. I'd describe Mail as unified with a source-list-style list on the left.
Brian Amerige — Jun 12, 07 4332
It's really a "first reaction" question. I'm growing to like it more and more, but my initial reaction to seeing that the entire UI was dark-gray was not a good one --- it just didn't seem visually appealing to me. The same reaction was seen by quite a few others (a friend of mine, for example, who isn't a developer, saw Leopard yesterday and actually asked "what the heck happened to mail and system preferences?"), and I'm interested to see if that was a point of concern among others. It's obviously a personal opinion, albeit one which I'm positive I'll adjust to.
I wasn't referring to Mail as a whole, but rather the toolbar and window title's appearance --- light plastic. Under 10.4, System Preferences as well as Xcode shared this appearance. As I stated before, my initial concern was that switching these applications to a dark-shade may cause serious conflicts with existing apps, as they were designed around the light concept. These conflicts seemed more pronounced at first, albeit less so now, but even so, it does present an issue for developers looking to deliver 10.4 + 10.5 applications.
For example, the darker shade obviously affects the design of toolbar icons, and since "unified" in Tiger looks different than "unified" in Leopard, it creates an aesthetic problem as to which style to design icons around, or gluecode to determine which icons to use under which OS.
While I'm positive moving toward a consistent UI is a good thing, I'm also positive we're going to end up with a bunch of ugly applications towards the beginning of 10.5's launch. The good outweighs the bad here, but it's still worth asking about what other developers are intent on doing for their 10.4 + 10.5 applications.
Carl — Jun 13, 07 4343
At first, I was a little bit disappointed with the keynote, and how there aren't any really huge changes in 10.5, just small refinements, but as I have more time to get used to it, I guess that is a good thing. If you had asked me what I wanted for 10.5 right after 10.4 came out, probably the main thing I would have said is, "Reduce bugginess; FTFF; no more brushed metal; more consistency with the HIG." So, it does look like they're heading in that direction.
They can save the real revolution for OS 11 (which by all rights should be the next after 10.5), eh?
Scott Stevenson — Jun 13, 07 4347
Somebody seems to say this for every single Mac OS X release, so I guess it's a very subjective thing. The significance of features very much depends on how you use the computer.
Jim — Jun 13, 07 4357
I cannot say anything specific because of the NDA, but WebObjects is definitely NOT dead. In fact, I am more excited about WebObjects since yesterday than I have been since 2002.
The WebObjects session yesterday was fantastic, and they added a BOF session which was also a great success.
Eric — Jun 15, 07 4369