This is probably my last entry from San Francisco. I’ll be leaving tomorrow in the evening. I can’t wait to get home.

I really hate San Francisco’s public transport system (= Muni). Today I probably spent two hours waiting for some stupid bus that either did not arrive (because of a parade which I found out much too late) or they had much too long intervals. The problem is, you simple don’t know when they will come because there is no sign with the arrival times. There is only a sign telling you on what weekdays and between which hours the busses operate on this line.

The highlight of the day was the exhibition “Monet in Normandy”. The admission was very very high and they had no students discounts, but I think it was well worth it. Sadly it was very crowed in there (I also had to wait in line for 15 minutes to buy the ticket) and I had a hard time getting a good view of the images.

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 ;-)

The Apple Compus Bash was an other WWDC highlight. It took place on the Apple Campus in Cupertino and Apple provided free busses for all the WWDC attendees. To be honest I didn’t see a lot of this event. I spent about one and a half hour in line for the Apple Company store. This is the only store worldwide that carries Apple-FanBoy-Articles. I bought mugs and other useless stuff.

I started to catch up with everything I had to push back during WWDC and I’m a bit surprised about the cold reception the keynote and Leopard received in the blogosphere. It’s true that Apple didn’t show of a lot of new features that are important to the endusers at the keynote. But this has a very simple reason: it was a preview for developers! Many new technologies, that will be included in the goldmaster, weren’t even mentioned in the keynote and even the blogs don’t write about them. After attending various sessions about the forthcoming OS X release it’s my honest belief that this will be a major step forward. Just wait and see for yourself.

By the way, if you are planning to visit San Francisco and you are thinking about taking the Alcatraz tour, get you tickets early! I tried to buy tickets today, but they only had a few left for Wednesday - I’ll leave on Tuesday. I’ve been there nine yours ago, so I can live with it.

WWDC06 is over and I’m quite aware that I’m well behind with my blog entries. The last couple of days have been very long and tiresome. I only went to my hotel room to sleep for some hours and spent the rest of the day at Moscone Center.

I’ll continue posting short entries about the WWDC in the next couple of days.

Thusday was a very intense day. Sessions started at 9 am and I visited the Apple Design Awards and the must see special event Stump The Experts in the evening. I only returned to my hotel at around 11 pm.

Core Animation seems to be a great framework, but the Keynote presentation gave a wrong picture about it’s functionality. It can do 3D stuff, but it’s really build for 2D graphics. I don’t know how they move the camera in the demo, but I think it’s some kind of rearranging the layers in the z dimension.

Objective 2.0 brings some really great new features into the language. Especially the properties are a real help when developing Core Data application and the implementation of the Garbage Collection seems to be pretty solid.

Thuesday’s Agenda:
User Interface Design
Taking Advantage of Leopard Features in Cocoa
Introducing Core Animation
Objective-C 2.0 Overview
Core Data in a Nutshell
Apple Design Awards
Stump the Experts

Today was the big day. I was finally able to be at a Steve Jobs keynote. I got up early and started to queue at around 6:45 outside Moscone Center, hoping to get a good seat. After waiting in line for about three hours, I was able to secure a seat in about the center of the room. The first few rows were reserved for VIPs and the press.

The keynote was an interesting experience which can’t be described in words. Steve Jobs and the rest of the speakers gave the audience what they really wanted to hear: lot’s of Windows bashing and finally a really competitive desktop system. The new Leopard features are good, but I have the feeling that the really big thing is missing. Apple will probably introduce a new Finder, a Time Machine .mac service and something big next year in January.

After the Keynote I had lunch (Apple is providing me with a fructose-free vegetarian meal) and I got my Leopard discs. Later today I went to the sessions Mac OS X State of the Union, Development Tools State of the Union and Graphics and Media State of the Union and in the evening to the ADC Opening Reception.

The new developer tools and frameworks are amazing. Interface Builder got a major overhaul and Core Animation seems to be the thing I’ve been waiting for. It contains more or less the same features that I had planed to include in my ICFramework. I’ll probably dump it and start from scratch.

The Student Day was filled with pretty interesting sessions today. When I got my bag and tshirt in the morning, I was again reminded that I’m not allowed to talk about the content of the sessions (except the keynote) that I attend at WWDC. So I’ll only give you two names: Aaron Hillegass and Wil Shipley. As you can see Apple selected really well-known presenters for todays sessions!!

I got my bag and tshirt in the morning at Moscone Center. The tshirt reads “Veni. Vidi. Codi.” on the front and “ WWDC06″ on the back).