We’re home now, recovering from our first WWDC. What a crazy week! It was our first WWDC, so we went in with no prior experience and lots of expectations.
We started the week off right, we met up with Rana from Medialets for drinks and a little work talk about InsideMobile and 360|iDev. Rana rocks, there’s little else to be said on the topic, she’s awesome, knows her stuff, and knows everyone. We’re very excited to be working with Medialets again.
After that it was keynote line ride time. We got up early (not crazy early, since when we went back to our hotel at around 10pm I think, there was already 1 guy in line)
. We were around 407 in line, we got there about 7am IIRC. Yeah it’s crazy.
Having now ridden the WWDC line ride, I think I’m good. It’s not something I need to do again.
The line didn’t move at all until about 7:30 or so. Then we slowly filed into the Moscone center. Where there were donuts and bagels and coffee waiting for us. Then we waited some more, but at least it was warm and we could sit down.
We met the guys behind dogood (iTunes link), which is an awesome ‘pay it forward’ application. Check it out, and who doesn’t need help with Karma points!?
The keynote was cool, neat stuff announced hardware wise, nothing too “OH MY GOD”
Tom and I left the keynote just before the iPhone 3G S was revealed to take in the Symbian Hackathon. Symbian is really working to get more developers exposed to the platform which is great. Giving away free 5800′s is a huge move in the right direction. Developers aren’t likely to strike out into a new platform, for no reason, with no way to actually play with their code. Having a free phone to test with, reduces many barriers to adoption. It’s definitely gutsy to throw an event in enemy territory, but Symbian pulled it off. The hackathon had a good turnout, and a few folks even wrote some code onsite and played with it, experiencing the deployment to a Symbian device, they did a good job.
Palm on the other hand :( I’ll admit our expectations were set by Symbian, but Palm broke a major rule. How do you have a Palm Pre developer get together with no Palm Pres in sight? Nothing about MojoSDK either. Just drinks and some food. Granted, giving a Pre woulda been costly, but you’re trying to steal developers away from another camp. Drastic times call for drastic measures. At the very least, have some Pres lying around to play with. We got more face time with a Pre during Rana’s drink hour (see above), then we did at the Palm Pre party. Not a good way to attract developers.
WWDC as a whole is a neat event, but too long, and too ‘line ride-ish. Every session starts with a line. Since there’s very few sessions in general , each one was several hundred people in size, sometimes over 1000. That’s just too big. There’s very little if any developer community involvement, sessions are given by Apple engineers, and range between reiterating what’s in the docs to fairly code intensive deep dive stuff.
The nightlife of WWDC is insane. There seemed to be, on any given night, 5 or more competing/overlapping parties. Between parties to launch companies or apps, to just plain “Come hang out on my dime” parties, it was intense. Syncing up with friends was an effort, with “we’re at X” only to arrive and see a tweet “We moved to Y”
I’m all for parties and keeping everyone entertained, but I didn’t attend a single party that was good for anything but drinking and losing your voice to have a conversation. You couldn’t mingle because it was too crowded, conversations were tough, because of the volume of the other 100-200 people jammed into the same small place, and if music was playing, well just shut up and drink.
The Best part?
Meeting new people in the hallways, and syncing up with our speakers from 360|iDev San Jose. The USB drive hunt was also a ton of fun, and seemed to be very well received. We had 7 USB drives packed with discounts on products, promo codes for games, and sneak peaks at new services, and each drive (except one that we think is in a Hobo’s pocket) was claimed fairly quickly after being dropped off. The buzz around the hunt was incredible. Next year it’ll be even better with more goodies on the drives! We’ll be picking one of our USB Hunters to receive an iPod Touch, sometime this week.
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