We arrived in San Francisco for WWDC on Sunday morning. I never really appreciated the video iPod until trapped on an Airbus from Austin to San Francisco for three hours.

Good Eats

In the general vicinity of Union Square and the Moscone Center, there’s a ton of good food from names you know and love. The food court at The Metreon has some great fare. However, I’m love hole-in-the-wall joints, and there’s plenty of that around. My favorite joint so far, Lori’s Diner, has two locations within walking distance of our hotel.

A special mention has to go to Tommy’s Joint on Cathedral Hill, partly because the turkey sloppy joe was fabulous, and partly because we had the company of renowned anime voice actor Vic Mignogna and Wallace & Gromit key animator Merlin Crossingham, with whom we had the rather impressive experience of discussing the intricacies of voice acting, Mac troubleshooting, stop motion animation, and XServe RAID configuration. Oh, and I got to touch the Were-rabbit.

On With The Show

Various news websites might leave you with the impression that WWDC is just a west coast replacement for the east coast MacWorld Expo of yore, where Apple and a teeming horde of others release ritzy new products and wow customers, investors, and reporters alike. The modern rumormill certainly does nothing to dispel this perception. The reality is that WWDC is more like university than an expo. There’s no show floor to speak of, though there are a couple of booths where Apple shows off some technologies of mostly developer geek interest. The demoed technologies and implementations have limited appeal to end users but are insanely important to developers and extremely-high-end IT professionals.

Don’t get me wrong. WWDC is insanely exciting… to its target audience. You can’t really dress up API changes and new data types for users. New debugging tools and re-imagined IDEs, on the other hand, are of supreme importance to us, but ultimately have no direct impact on end users at all. You don’t really care what kind of hammers and saws your homebuilder uses, you just care that the house he builds you is what you wanted. WWDC is all about tools, from the hammers (IDE enhancements) to the nails (Objective-C and Cocoa).

As a first-timer at WWDC, which is a fun story in and of itself, this week has been a learning experience both in terms of being a Mac programmer and being a WWDC attendee. For instance, the former Mac Genius in me is well aware of the Mac user’s propensity for queueing up early for things, so we arrived at Moscone West a good two hours ahead of time. That same former Mac Genius in me probably should have guessed that two hours was not nearly early enough and, in fact, would have been right considering about three-quarters of the other attendees were already in line when we arrived.

Many might ask, “If WWDC is so exciting for you, the developer, what is it that’s so exciting?” The answer to that is not very forthcoming not only because WWDC sessions are confidential but also because the answer is vastly different for each and every product. In the end, it’s going to be a huge leap forward not only for the platform but also for computing in general, and just as Apple is holding many of their cards close to their chest, many developers will too.