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! :)
“people brake the laws” devia ser “people break the laws” =)
Thanks! :)