The thing that really surprised me about WWDC was how well all the sessions were organized. Every room had it’s own stage director (+assistant) and each time you really had the feeling to be at a smaller version of the keynote. When you entered the room “hip” music was playing which only faded away moments before the speaker entered the stage. At the same moment the light dimmed and a voice introduced the person on stage. All the slides had the same theme and surprisingly all of them were pretty good. One guy revealed that a team at Apple assists with creating the slides and gives advice on how to organize the presentation.

Every session had a length of about 80 minutes. Normally the presentation lasted about 60-80 minutes and it was followed by a Q&A. At the end of the 80 Minutes the room light turned on again and the speaker hurried to end the session. Only seconds after the end the music faded back in.

To help the presenters every stage had at least one big black plasma screen in front of it (they stood on the floor so only the guys in the front row saw them) and a display which counted down the remaining time.

Only from time to time presenters had bad luck and they started praying to the “demo god”. One very funny thing happend on the last day. Wil Shipley gave a demo of his own app. He wanted to show how the barcode scanner of his apps works when a message on screen appeared telling him that he has to license the application to scan in more items. You can probably imagine the reaction of the audience ;-)