Attending WWDC 2005

Apple just announced some initial details for WWDC 2005, and developers are no doubt evaluating whether they'll attend this year.

For those that don't know, the "hook" for WWDC over the last few years has been that walking through the door entitled you to a developer preview of the next version of Mac OS X. Last year's attendees were given an early seed of Tiger, for example. There's no early seed this year, at least not yet.

Based on what I've seen in the recent Tiger builds, it's pretty clear why this is the case. In a sense, Jaguar and Panther were about reaching a certain plateau of functionality and refinement. Tiger is a far more aggressive project. Apple has managed to get just so much into this release that a second conference on it actually does make sense. Whether that's enough to make you want to attend is another question.

There were a number of sessions last year that covered APIs and tools which were very much in flux. There wasn't really any time for "best practices" or anything of that nature. Moving on to yet another release of the OS at this point would probably probably cause more frustration than excitement. Tiger provides developers with plenty of stuff to chew on for a while.



The nature of WWDC has been evolving too. I don't think it would be unfair to say that WWDC used to be a somewhat obscure event in the minds of the overall Mac population. Unless you were a C programmer and wrote applications, you weren't guaranteed to really get anything out of the conference. The smaller venue probably contributed to this feeling.

It appears, though, that Apple has made a conscious decision to turn WWDC into a much more general technical conference. Not only has it become a place for new technology to be announced, but there are now bonafide web development and enterprise/IT sessions.

Not to mention WWDC is simply a lot of fun. Last year, I met two people in person that I had only worked with over the internet. It's the one week per year when I can expect that most people I encounter will know what key-value coding is. Not to mention all the after-hours stuff. Did I mention there are no deliverables, action items or meetings while you're there?

All of this aside, though, WWDC has replaced Macworld SF as "the conference" I go to each year. Scheduling conflicts prevented me from going to Macworld last month, and I realized that I didn't really miss it. The endless stream of hired public speakers and marketing gimmicks add up to a bit too much of a zoo for my taste. I just don't feel like I get much out of it. On the other hand, I always leave WWDC excited to go out and play around with some new ideas.

Comments Temporarily Disabled

I had to temporarily disable comments due to spam. I'll re-enable them soon.