WWDC 2008 recap
This year was the first time I’ve attended WWDC …and the last time I flew US Airways. After a terrible flight
to San Francisco with a 4 hour delay in Philadelphia I arrived very early the Sunday morning. As every reasonable priced hotel was booked out Marcus
and I shared a private room at the HI hostel near Union Square. Just a few blocks from the conference venue. For sure not the best hostel
I’ve stayed in, but OK for the few hours we spent there every night.
I have to say it was an intense week. Registration on Sunday and off to a couple of pre-conference parties. The SF Mac Indie gathering was really good. After very few hours of sleep we lined up in front of the convention center. At around 5 in the morning we joined the line that already was about 200m and quickly became a couple of blocks long. This is just crazy! But we figured it would be worth to make it to the keynote at least once. Seating is limited in the keynote hall – so you better get up early. (The first people line up there at 11pm the night before!)
So after a lot of waiting, queuing and more waiting we finally got into the sacred halls. Somewhere in row 20-30. Not too
shabby. Unfortunately (as you might have seen) the keynote itself was really disappointing and way below the Apple standards. Felt
like they somehow had to fill up the time with all these iPhone app demos. (Yawn!) The release of the iPhone 3G is of course great – but was already more than just highly
anticipated. Unfortunately it wasn’t even available at the day of the announcement. We will have to wait until July 11th. Many details like carriers and the activation just slowly
began to surface over the past few days. (I so don’t want to switch to T-Mobile!)
The following days were a loop of: get up early, watch sessions, lunch, go to labs, dinner, parties/gathering, drinks, fall to bed. All sessions I’ve attended were really
professional. Some a little to basic and some way over my head. As there were multiple tracks it was unfortunate to miss out on so many. I hope they will be available on the ADC site
soon. Due to the stupid NDA one cannot really talk about the content, but a fair bit of cool stuff has been presented. 
What I found the most useful though were the labs. You sit 1:1 with an Apple engineer who answers questions or even goes through your code with you. Just
incredible how many question I was able to cross off. It does depend a little on what engineer you end up with though.
In general the conference was very well run. Perfectly organized. Food was OK and there were even proper drinks besides water and coffee. At 5200 attendees I was surprised there were no wifi problems – at all. Barenaked Ladies played at the Apple party on Thursday. Just too bad they run out of the proper beer. I have to say with 5 days, the labs, all the sessions available for download it was really worth the money (= 180 EUR per day). Probably more than other conferences I’ve been to. What comes with the size is an anonymous touch though.
A few pictures are available on flickr.