Radio Bantik:
Days in the Life of an Alpha Geek

I had the good fortune to be sent off to Apple’s WWDC event for work this month. It was an incredible experience, and the only reason that I haven’t blogged about it up to now is the fact that I’m exhausted from bouncing between three different timezones in as many weeks.

I travelled with someone from my team so that we could split up between relevant sessions that were scheduled at the same time. We covered off on every WebObjects and Java session, and also signed up to spend time with Apple engineers to address performance tuning, debugging, and user experience for some of our existing web apps. I was struck by the fact that there was no session that we attended that felt like a waste of time– we learned something new and immediately useful in every case.

We also went to the WebKit Open Source party and, of course, the big party at the Apple campus. I ran into an old colleague, Jon Monroe from Actual Technologies (purveyor of fine ODBC drivers for OS X) and enjoyed the opportunity to catch up with him over Venetian tapas, beer, and diner food. (I last saw Jon on our MacWorld adventure two years ago.)

There are a lot of specifics that I can’t discuss because of the NDA with Apple, but trust me that, the lukewarm keynote presentation notwithstanding, there are a lot of cool new under-the-hood technologies rolling out with the next generation of OS X. Smart developers will be turning out some pretty amazing applications for Leopard.

Although we will be able to tap into some of these designed-for-the-desktop technologies in WebO, through some very cool tips that we picked up through conversations with Apple engineers, I’m feeling somewhat jealous of desktop application developers at the moment.