WWDC wrapup

This was the best WWDC yet, but not because of the sold-out crowd, the long lines, or the dry sandwiches. Rather, it’s the one week out of the year where I get to be in a college-like setting, going to classes during the day and drinking all night, hanging out with people I like. This year I spent more time in labs or in the lobby areas talking to other developers and Apple engineers. Eventually I’ll probably end up skipping all the sessions and hanging out with people, since you can watch the session videos later, but all the people who flew in and all the Apple engineers are only going to be there for a week.

I went to two labs, the QTKit one and the Audio Lab, and because they’re both Mac labs, I had an engineer all to myself for an entire hour in each lab, which was great because I didn’t have a very specific question, but I could tell them about the general problems I had, and what I thought would be a good solution, and they could tell me I was barking up the wrong tree and go into detail about alternative solutions, while going over all the little things that might go wrong.

The sessions were also great, because there were many new features in iOS 5 and Lion. Previous years, many of the sessions were repeats of last year’s or very basic introductory material. With the dark, warm rooms and a boring presenter, I was at risk of falling asleep.

I’m about to board my flight from SFO to NYC so I’ll have to end this here, but this was an amazing get together, with the mood of the people, the content, and all the impromptu stuff that happened making it all great.