Terminal.app

Well, I’m back from another WOWODC and WWDC. I’m still really tired, but some quick notes:

• As David LeBer already mentioned, Pascal did an amazing job organizing WOWODC all by himself. Great room (a bit cold on the first day ;) ), large windows and sunlight on the halls. Food (well… not that good, but after all, it’s USA!) and caffeine provided frequently. Very very nice. Suggestion for the next year: a bigger (and brighter) screen, and eventually plasma screens among the room to make it easy for people in the back to read the code.
• I learned a lot about WO frameworks out there (like Wonder, Houdah and specially LEWOStuff that I did not know before). I met for the first time some very talented people, and of course, all the folks from the previous conferences. It’s great to be able to have technical discussions and know different views on the same problems from all those skilled and experienced people out there, face to face.
• WWDC had some interesting news on many stuff. As you know, I cannot talk about the stuff under NDA, so I shall only say that some interesting stuff is being done on the WO side. Also, as you all know by now, the iPhone is now 3G, includes a GPS, the price was slashed, and will be available in many countries of the world. I just hope the service providers slash the data roaming prices, because that makes the iPhone useless when you go to foreign countries. Finally, Snow Leopard was announced, and, as already expected, the focus is not on new features, but on a big cleanup of the OS infrastructure. Not only this are great news for us, developers, but also shows some courage from Apple and a lot of respect for their users. They want to focus the next year on improving the quality of their OS, rather than packing it up with some new features just to win the race against the competition.
• As a side note, the MacTech people was giving away some magazines for free to the people who were standing in line during the morning. I took the time to read most of it during my flight, and I really liked it. I was a MacTech subscriber in the past, but I cancelled it because, during my graduation, I didn’t have time to read it (it’s good to graduate on a place where you actually don’t have time to learn, isn’t it?). Maybe I’ll subscribe it again now.
• Not related to the conferences themselves, we went to visit the bay area surroundings on Friday afternoon. We did the classic trip to the Apple and Google campuses, because we are all geeks, but we also went to the Stanford and Berkeley campuses. The Standford campus totally blow me away. You have to see it to believe it. From now on, I’ll laugh, really laugh, every time I hear a faculty from my university stating that we actually have a campus. The Berkeley campus did not impress me much. It’s more urban style, more crowded and dense. I prefer the Stanford way, with space, a huge amount of space, tons and tons of space, really. Almost made me want to return to the univ! :)