Archive for June, 2009

WWDC 2009

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

Contrarily to WOWODC, I didn’t like WWDC at all this year. Some reasons for that were:

  • The IT track (the one that is of most interest for me) was very poor on this WWDC edition. There were a few talks about OS X Server and some of it’s new technologies, and that was it.
  • There was one (yes, one) talk about Java. This is ridiculous, specially if you consider that, a few years ago, Apple was selling the Mac as the best platform for developing and deploying Java applications. The first time I was at WWDC, 2006, there were a few Java sessions with interesting content. Don’t get me wrong, I love Cocoa, but some people need decent Java support to work.
  • No WebObjects content at all. The only official note about WebObjects was an announcement of an announcement that should happen within weeks. I don’t have any more details (and if I had, they would be under NDA, of course). This is sort of understandable, as they focused their attention on WOWODC, but it makes WWDC kind of pointless for people working on WebObjects projects in full time.
  • They somehow managed to serve even worse food than last year. Those guys must have some special talent, I thought it could not get worse than last years, buy they crossed that barrier at full speed. Also, there was no food on monday of tuesday evening, making it a little hard to eat and get back to watch the Apple Design Awards ceremony on time.
  • There were attendees distributing flyers and merchandising material inside the Moscone, despite the fact that doing that is clearly against the conference rules. Many people that attend WWDC work for some company, but a large part of the attendees own their own business, and everyone would love to promote it. But this is not a consumer exhibition, it’s a developer conference, with well defined rules, and people must respect them. What pissed me even more was the fact that the same flyers were distributed every day, by the same people, and no one from security kicked those guys out. It kinda looked like Portugal, where people break the laws with no apparent consequences.
  • Moscone center was at the limit of it’s capacity, and that showed. Although they could arrange the room sizes and session schedule way better than last year (I could attend all the sessions I wanted, which didn’t happen last year due to some of the rooms being full), there were not enough seats (either on the round tables, or the sofas) on the halls. On the first days it was really hard to find a place to rest for a while, or to write some lines of code.

I think Apple should seriously consider moving to a larger space, or breaking the WWDC in two separate conferences. Maybe one for newbies and another one for advanced users, or one for iPhone OS and another one for Mac and IT. I believe the WWDC is becoming less interesting every year, and the numbers back me up.

Apple claims that 60% of the attendees at WWDC 09 were first timers. Given that they sold out in 2008 and 09, and the Moscone capacity was the same on both events (around 5200 attendees), clearly a lot of people that came to 08 didn’t find it very interesting to come back this year. The fact that they sold out is based on the iPhone SDK hype, but people seem to be not coming back on the next year. I know I won’t, unless something deeply changes about WWDC.

I could not finish, of course, without congratulating João Pavão and the Sofa team for their well-deserved Apple Design Award on Versions, their SVN client. Really good job, guys! :)

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WWDC 2009 (Keynote)

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

I found most of the keynote announcements interesting.

The hardware upgrades on the MacBook Pros were cool. First, Apple seemed to acknowledge that the difference between the unibody MacBook and the MacBook Pro was not strong enough, so the MacBook is dead, long live MacBook Pro. This means the 13 inch laptop has now some of the Pro features, namely Firewire was brought back, in it’s 800 Mbps version. Other nice stuff, like the non-removable high capacity battery and the back-lighted keyboard made their way to the MacBook Pro 13”. The usual CPU speed bumps were there, of course. The only decision that left people a bit confused was the introduction of the SD-card reader. Not only it seems useless (because you may plug any SD-card enabled device to your Mac using USB) but because it kicked out some old features on the Macs that got it. The Express card slot went away on the MacBook 15”, and the Audio in port on the MacBook (now Pro) 13” was replaced by an Audio in/out jack found on the iPhones. Although you can buy an Apple headset to plug there, there’s an obvious question not yet answered, how to record audio from the line in?

The MacBook Air also got some CPU upgrades, and very interesting price cuts. Finally they are not ridiculously overcharging (at least, not as much as they did) the MacBook Air form factor, despite the fact that the machine specs were disappointing. I think they should ship them with 4 GB of RAM instead of 2 (specially because it’s not upgradable), but despite that it’s becoming a really interesting machine to buy if you travel a lot. The only feature I miss (and I was hoping to find it on this new machines) is a 3G modem, which would avoid carrying one more USB dongle. But they may be because of…

… the iPhone. Apple surprised me with the new iPhone 3GS and the 3.0 version of the OS. Despite the ugly name, the 3GS is a really nice improvement to the old model, and the differences are in the details. Among all, we have:

  • (3GS only) Hardware encryption of all your data. That’s really cool on a device that can easily be lost or stolen. This helps keeping your data private, but it’s not all.
  • Find my iPhone. Every mobile phone user went trough this at least once. You look for your iPhone, but it seems to be nowhere. If it’s somewhere around your house, you just grab the landline phone, call it, and follow the ringtone. But sometimes, no ringtone will sound, and that’s the time you start panicking. Did you left it in the car? Or maybe in a restaurant? Or, worse, someone stole it without you even noticing? Now, if you subscribe MobileMe, you can simply access the service, and ask for the current localization of the phone. If it’s turned on, the iPhone will report it’s current position (based on the usual localization facilites, like GPS or WiFi triangulation) that will be presented on a map. But there’s more: you may ask the phone to make some noise, and display a message with your landline phone number and address, and with luck, someone will pick it up and return it to you, or deliver it to a local police station. There’s the nice detail that the phone will make noise even if it’s set to silent. But, even better, if your phone is lost forever, you can still keep your data private. Just beam it an order to wipe all the data on it, and the phone will start erasing your stuff. If it’s encrypted, the wipe is immediate. Later, if you get back your iphone, just plug it to your Mac, and the content will be restored from your backups (which can also be encrypted, for extra protection).
  • Tethering. This one is big, at least for me. iPhone will share it’s 3G connection either trough the USB cable or Bluetooth. This is awesome, allowing you to pay only one 3G subscription instead of two (one for the phone, and one for the laptop). Also, no more crappy 3G modems with questionable quality drivers.

There are also some nice details, like the faster CPU on the 3GS, MMS support, better camera, etc. The iPhone is becoming more and more interesting, and I may find myself finally getting one, if the portuguese operators manage to sell them for decent (or not very indecent) prices.

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WOWODC 2009

Tuesday, June 16th, 2009

So, it’s time to wrap up the annual crazy week in San Francisco. This year, we had a two days conference entirely dedicated to WebObjects (WOWODC 2009) on the weekend right before the week-long WWDC. As I had about 12 hours with nothing to do inside two US Airways planes, I wrote quite a bit of text, that I’ll split into 3 different posts. Here’s the first one, about WOWODC.

WOWODC

WOWODC 2009 was, by far, the best WOWODC ever. Last year’s WOWODC was good, but a large part of the content, although interesting, was stuff not used for the majority of WebObjects developers. This year, the organizers and speakers have decided to talk about stuff used daily by most of the WO developers to get their work done, covering from some nice EOF details to the WO 5.4 templating system, and of course, new Wonder stuff.

But that was not everything. Apple was there too. 16 of the slightly over 100 attendees were Apple employees. One talk (the WO 5.4 templating system) was given by Drew Davidson, from Apple. But, there’s even more: Mike presented Gianduia, a stunning technological preview of a new framework the Apple guys are working on, with an amazing approach to handling Ajax and client-side programming in a logical and powerful way. This is the framework already being used internally by Apple on the One to One application (for those who don’t know, the One to One is a service provided by Apple on it’s stores, with the purpose of assisting users with their computer usage).

Watching Apple employees attending and presenting on non-Apple events is rare, and public previews of what they are working on is almost unimaginable. Yet, it did happen, and it shows how committed Apple is to WebObjects and it’s community.

One interesting detail was the fact that Mike, due to medical reasons, could not be there, so he did his presentations (three of them) using iChat audio conference and screen sharing. It was amazing how well it did go (specially with the crappy network the hotel provided us). Mike did an amazing job on this, and it really seemed like he was there with us.

Above all, I want to thank all speakers, all the Apple people who went there (including Pierre who is making an important effort inside Apple to push WebObjects forward), and above all, Pascal Robert, and he’s incredible personal (and financial) effort that, once again, made WOWODC happen, and in style.

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