With this being my fourth year
as a MacCompanion columnist, I now bring you my fourth annual report on
Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference. For
those who do not already know,
Apple hosts this
week-long conference
about this time every year, preparing
developers for
the newest technologies that are expected in the upcoming year. In recent
years, the conference attendance size has continued to grow, with tickets completely
selling out
these past two years. (Actually,
WWDC '07
was also technically sold out, although this was compensated for by Apple cutting
back on the number of its own employees from attending.)
Much of the material disclosed
during WWDC is covered by a
Non-Disclosure Agreement
(NDA), meaning that I can speak about such matters only to others who are under
NDA. However, there is a great deal of material that is available to the
general public. This includes the WWDC keynote address, which has been made
available by Apple for viewing. It can also be viewed on
YouTube. Other
material not included in the keynote may also be outside Apple's NDA, if it is
publicly released. An example of this is
OpenCL,
a new Apple technology which is released as an open industry standard. Finally,
there are technologies owned or used by Apple, but are part of the public domain. Two
examples of these include
gcc and
CUPS,
both critical to
Mac OS X,
but are free for all to view.
New Operating Systems
The two central topics for this
year's conference was
Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and
iPhone OS 3.0. Unlike
most of the Mac OS X upgrades in recent years, 10.6 will not see major new features
or user interface overhauls (despite the false
rumor of a new interface named Marble
predicted in various newsgroups). The goal for 10.6 is
performance improvements
and better developer tools for creating next generation products. For this
reason, Apple has modified its usual $129 upgrade path for new versions of Mac OS X,
and will be charging
only $29 to current Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard users. 10.6 is an
Intel-only OS,
and is expected to be available in September. Apple had originally hoped
to release 10.6 at
WWDC '09,
but inevitable delays caused them to announce in May that conference attendees
would instead receive a
"final developer preview release". On
the day of the conference keynote, the term final was replaced with near final,
indicating that there will be (at least) one more prerelease of 10.6 between this
and its commercial release in
September. Next month
I will devote a column specifically to the upcoming Snow Leopard OS, but this
month I will write about the conference itself.
As it was with
last year's conference, the
iPhone
was a huge part of this year's conference as well. And this is not surprising
considering the number of iPhone and
iPod Touches
that have been sold. At the keynote, it was mentioned that
the OS X installed base has tripled
due to these devices. Consider: many of us
Macintosh
fans have been around for 20 years, being very loyal and proud supporters of the
platform. But there are now two iPhone/iPod Touch users for every one
Mac user. This all in just two years.
Wow.
I must admit, I am not sure what
to think about that. We Mac developers have just been instantly eclipsed
by the iPhone. We are now in their shadow, not the other way around ... at
least as far as numbers go. And the demographics are different too. If
you walked into a typical Mac session at this year's WWDC, you would mostly see
what you would expect: redominantly male programmers, mostly in their 40's, most
having been Mac people for the past two decades. But walk into an iPhone
session, and what do you see? Young people, in their 20's ... and a noticeable
number of young women in the mix. All with the enthusiasm and excitement
about the iPhone that I had about the Mac back in the 1980's.
I suddenly found myself feeling a little old.
Not that there's really any reason
to feel this way. After all, both the Mac and iPhone platforms are variations
of OS X. There is significant overlap in the
Cocoa API for developing
for both. And let's face it, Mac users still bring in the revenue, as even
the most expensive iPhone is still far cheaper than the least expensive iMac. But
there is this nagging feeling that the present Mac developer community will soon
be giving way to a new generation. Perhaps it's happening already. After
all, 60% of this year's attendees are first timers ... it seems very likely that
they are predominantly interested in the iPhone.
However, it does appears that
Mac developers were the ones willing to do more to attend WWDC. Why do I
say that? It came about from noticing what seemed to be a random fluctuations
for final prices in scalped WWDC tickets on Ebay. One auction would sell
its ticket for $1600 after only 2 bids while another selling for over $3000 after
47 bids, all in the same day, mere hours apart. I didn't understand this
until I saw the pattern: those with ending prices of less than $2000 had auction
titles like "WWDC 2009 Apple Developer Conference ticket", while
the ones selling for more than that (often much more) had titles like "WWDC
Ticket Apple Conference San Francisco Mac Developer". When the
auction title included the word "Mac" (not just "Apple"),
it sold on average for $1000 more.
Disappointments Galore
Although this is my 4th MacCompanion
article on WWDC, it is actually my 12th time in attendance. Sadly, I have
watched this conference slowly degrade with time. In years past, WWDC would
offer great parties, wonderful food, so many giveaways and t-shirts that you needed
to pack an extra suitcase. Today, it has been reduced to a mere shadow of
its former self. And WWDC '09 was perhaps the conference's historic low.
Simply put, WWDC '09 was filled
with disappointments. Some of these disappointments were not Apple's fault. For
example, last minute excitement generated
a rumor that Steve Jobs might make an appearance
at the keynote address. Of course he did not. A
liver transplant
is major surgery, and there would be no way he could have been there. However,
no one at the time knew about this surgery, so unbridled enthusiasm reigned.>
Other disappointments were due
entirely to the scaling back of the conference amenities. In WWDC's past,
one could get by with evening WWDC snacks for
dinner. Three years ago,
I dined at Apple's expense each of the four evenings of the conference: Monday
was the WWDC Welcome Reception, Tuesday there was pizza and the like before the
Design Awards and Stump the Experts, Wednesday had more snacks during
the Scientific Poster Session
and encore sessions, and of course Thursday was the Apple Party. In
2007 &
2008,
they double-upped the Scientific Poster Session onto Tuesday, making Wednesday an
event-free night. This year, they killed off both the Scientific Poster
Session and the long-running WWDC Welcome Reception. Plus, they removed
all the food options Tuesday night. The only evening meal this year was
at the Apple Party on Thursday night.
Not that the lunches were any
great prize either. I never thought that the lunches could get worse, but
I was wrong. This year, they got rid of soda during lunch. Three liquid
options: canned sweetened ice tea, canned lemonade, and water. No
Coke,
no diet soda, nothing. (Although some diet soda showed up in mid-afternoon
sessions.) And the lunches themselves were these tasteless wrap options. For
the first time, I skipped the Apple lunches and ate out. (It seemed too
degrading to eat terrible food, while nearby San Francisco restaurants offered
some of the finest cuisine in the world.)
The crowds were also pretty bad
this year. Bad in the sense that it was overwhelming. Being another
sold-out conference, I had prepared myself for the lines being just as long as
last year. What I hadn't prepared for was that it was going to be even worse
this year! Due to the insistence of the San Francisco Fire Marshall, this
year's attendance numbers could not be appreciably larger than WWDC '08's (even
with Apple time-sharing its engineers better). However, crowding was worsened
by Apple's decision to run only sessions 7 at a time, instead of the usual 8. The
SOMA conference room was disbanded, and so each remaining session could expect
to see an (average) increase of 15% in audience size. Each presentation
session saw long lines of people queueing up.
The Apple Party ... well, it was
okay, I guess. It was the best food of the week, but of course that was
not saying much. The sushi was of course the best choice, but how excited
could I be lining up at the hot dog bar, or queueing to eat some unremarkable
pasta? The band was
Cake. So
am I totally uncool if I admit I've never heard of them? Yawn. After
last year's fantastic appearance of
the Bare Naked Ladies,
I guess it would have taken a lot to impress me.
Bright Spots
The high point of the conference
was certainly Tuesday night, with the double booking of the
Apple Design Awards and
Stump the Experts. ADA
is always interesting, in which the best of the best Macintosh and iPhone applications
get to be shown off. There was no single remarkable moment as there was
last year (when
John Geleynse
stole the show playing
Slow Ride on
Guitar Hero III),
but it was fun nonetheless. However, this year's crowd was so massive, even
the large Presidio auditorium could not hold everyone, so many of us had to watch
the Design Awards in an overflow room.
But the best of that night (and
of the entire conference) was Stump. Host
Fred Huxham
was in fine form that night, as usual. However, it was co-host
Mark Harlan (creator of the "Dogcow")
who really shined this year. In the past, Mark has sometimes upstaged Fred
a little too much, distracting from the event, but at Stump '09, Mark was absolutely
superb. I couldn't get enough of him, he was great. His interaction
with the audience was absolutely amazing, and his comedic timing was perfect.
The best point came with an audience
question, "What was the worst Mac?", causing almost the entire expert
assemblage to circle and argue over what would be the right answer. Even
a half hour into the discussion, you could see some experts still hotly debating
their points. Mark described the question as a
social denial of service attack.
This was perhaps the best Stump
I had ever seen.
Another very amusing event at
this year's conference took place Monday morning while we were all in line waiting
to get into the keynote. As we waited outside, jet-lagged and irritated, a
horse drawn carriage filled with scantily clad girls advertising
iPorn.com
pulled up to us. These half naked girls (in 55 degree weather, mind you)
came out to show their ... um ... wares. Most of us had a pretty good laugh
about it (since most of us were males), and the girls were very friendly to us
Mac developers.
Of course, it's certainly fair
to say that the excitement these girls showed was genuine. I know that they
were paid to be there, but I'm sure they'd have chosen to be there anyways. After
all, what would a bunch of bikini-clad 20 year olds prefer more than to flirt
with 5,000 out-of-shape, middle aged computer geeks? Surely they were there
to meet us personally. The porn web site they had printed on their bottoms
was completely beside the point, I'm sure.
(Hey, it's my article. I
can believe what I want.)
Failed Logistics
From a logistical point of view,
I'm sorry to say that this year's WWDC was the worst ever (even the iPorn
girls couldn't make it better). There is no close second (logistically speaking). Monday,
the opening day of the conference, was a complete nightmare. Beginning with
the keynote, everything went wrong. Although the keynote began promptly
at 10AM PT, it took Apple until after 10:30 to get everyone seated into the various
overflow rooms. People were very unhappy having paid all this money and
missed the entire opening segment of the keynote (I had to go back and watch the
hardware announcements over a streaming channel during lunch.) What makes
this inexcusable is that they had known for six weeks exactly how many
people would be in attendance. They sold out their tickets at the end of
April, so they had plenty of time to prepare and let people get to their seats
before the keynote's start.
Moreover, their (apparent) last
minute cancellation of the traditional Monday night WWDC Welcome Reception left
a number of us standing around and confused. Those using their iPhones to
see the conference schedule could figure out what happened, as Monday Night was
blanked out in the updated online schedule (no mention of a cancellation by the
way, just left blank). Those using computers had problems. If you
went to the WWDC Attendee page, you correctly saw no Monday night event, but if
you simply went to the
WWDC public page for Events,
it was still listed (and continues to be as I write this now). A number
of us stood around on the 2nd Floor for a good half hour waiting, until finally
Security told us the hall was closing. Quite bizarre.
Even more atypical was the rudeness
of one Apple conference organizer of whom I asked this very question. It
began by my asking the security person by the second floor escalator if the Welcome
Reception was still happening. He didn't know, but he wanted to find out
since I was the fourth person to ask him that. As we were chatting, I see
an Apple rep coming down the escalator from the 3rd floor, so we ask her. Curtly,
she just said "No.". I asked her if she knew that it was still advertised
on the Apple web site. Without stopping, she said "I don't think so," and
kept walking. I was taken aback by her rudeness, as Apple reps have always
bent over backwards to be helpful. While I stood there with my jaw open,
the security guy says to me, "Pleasant, isn't she?" (I liked this guy.) I
had a good chuckle over that. My only regret was that I was too stunned
by her abrupt manner to get a look at her name. Had I done so, I would certainly have
been happy to publicly share it in this column. I know her face though, and
if I see her again, I will let you dear readers know.
Demos were also poorly handled. The
last two iPhone demos that were supposed to climax Scott Forstall's talk, simply
failed to work. Despite the claim that everything worked correctly during
rehearsal, the two back-to-back failures were just embarrassing. Demos throughout
the conference failed, as if the presenters just didn't care enough to make sure
they worked. I know that can't be the case, but the continual on-stage bungling
just seems inexcusable to me.
It's as if they off-shored their
logistics people or something. 60% of this year's attendees were first
timers at WWDC, and they were not left with a very favorable impression. I
usually don't call for head rolling for such mistakes, but this year I feel it
is due. All of the Apple employees responsible for organizing this conference
ought to be fired. Period.
Conclusion
So how do I rate this year's conference? Logistically, it was an
F,
no question about it. But the keynote was an improvement over last year,
despite the failed demos and the missing
Steve Jobs,
perhaps a
C+. The
overall amenities I'd have to give a
D,
to the food another
F,
but Stump was a solid
A. (The
iPorn girls don't get a grade, since they are considered extra-curricular activity.)
Despite the good, I still come
away from this year's conference as the worst of the 12 WWDC's I have attended. Worse
even than the depressing
1997 conference,
in which attendees thought the Mac was finished. For this reason, I have
to give WWDC '09 the lowest grade yet: a
D.
Coming Up Next Month: In
depth analysis on the upcoming Snow Leopard operating system! See you in 30!
To see a list of all the According to Hoyle columns, visit: http://www.jonhoyle.com/maccompanion
http://www.maccompanion.com/macc/archives/July2009/Columns/AccordingtoHoyle.htm
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