Noodlings

Yes, it’s that time of year. I do have to say that I was on the fence about going this year. There didn’t seem to be anything new on the OS X front (this was before the recent rumors of 10.6) and I’m apparently one of the few people not terribly excited about iPhone development.

Nonetheless, I regretted not going to MacWorld and I felt that I would regret not going to WWDC. I did contemplate going to SF just to crash the parties. Then I thought that this will be my chance to hit the sessions for those APIs that I don’t normally use. I figure that the devs in the OS X sessions would be easier to get at since everybody will be in the iPhone sessions. Plus I always find the labs valuable.

So, if you see a wide-eyed developer who is peeing his pants over being able to write a countdown app on his iPhone, that’s not me. Instead, I’ll be the grumpy guy walking around trying to corner one of Apple’s filesystem engineers.

Ok, I’ve painted myself into a corner here. I’m back home finally but I don’t really have anything interesting to add (at least anything that won’t break NDA). Nonetheless, since I started talking about WWDC, I might as well cap it off.

As Gus Mueller mentions here, it seems that this year was much more oriented towards those new to the platform (and there were a lot of them). As for me, I found it a bit annoying to walk into a session and find out it was Quartz 101 or somesuch. I don’t mind the existence of such sessions; I just felt that they were not as clearly marked. It was sometimes hard to tell if a session would (a) tell us something new since last time or (b) touch on something more advanced, either of which I would have been satisfied with. Personally, I’d like to see some indication of level or prerequisites (or lack thereof) on sessions.

And like everyone else, I met a bunch of people and even got re-acquainted with a couple people who I haven’t seen in a decade. Maybe next year I should just skip the conference and just crash the parties…

Typing this up between sessions so please excuse the sloppy writing.

Stacks

When Steve started talking about cleaning the Desktop, my heart stopped for a split second. I thought I was going to be Sherlocked (I was also sitting with the Karelia guys at the time). As it turns out, Stacks is just doing what I’ve been suggesting for a while on my tips and tricks page: download everything to a separate downloads folder. Hazel stores the file’s date added and ships with a sample rule to color newly added files; Finder (or maybe the filesystem, I need to check) now keeps track of the date added as well and uses it to keep your most recently added files at the top of the stack. Nonetheless, those Stacks don’t clean themselves so, I think the main adjustment I need to make is to change the marketing message from “Clean Your Desktop” to “Clean Your Stacks”.

Miscellaneous KeyNote comments

I feel like I’m missing the point of the transparent menubar. You can’t drag windows up underneath the menubar. Are the top 20 or so pixels of your wallpaper that important? What do you need to see under there? While I appreciate the tricks they pulled to maintain legibility, it’s still not as clear as an opaque menubar. So yes, add me to the list of grumpy transparent menubar haters.

Did anyone find it odd that when showing the pie charts of Safari’s current market share and their target marketshare, that they had Safari eat up Firefox’s slice of the pie while IE’s market share remained unchanged? Not sure if one should read too much into it as it probably was inadvertent, but it does give the impression that Apple is gunning for Firefox.

Parties

A big thanks for Chuck Soper and Buzz Anderson for organizing their respective parties. The edge has to go to Buzz though since he arranged for a taco truck to be parked outside. Nothing like eating a taco with meat scraped off the face of a cow to start the evening off right.

I’ll probably drop by the OmniFocus get-together later today but won’t be able to make any of the other extracurricular events because of dinner plans.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I went to my first WWDC last year. I had recently quit my fulltime job. Hazel 1.0 was in beta at that time. Since my app was to be released on Tiger, all this Leopard talk seemed somewhat irrelevant. I was a newcomer and an unknown.

It’s not quite a year later but WWDC is here again. Hazel 2.0 is now in alpha. It is still targeted for Tiger so Leopard-specific features are still just in the concept phase for me. I’m now not a total unknown. Additionally, since the last WWDC, sales have increased by ∞% so things are going great!

I’m on the road already and am trying to squeeze out another release before the conference (most likely later today). I’ll be in SF on Sunday in time for the Mac ISV dinner. If you spot me, feel free to give me copious amounts of money; it’s what they call “networking.” How do you spot me? Well, take Rodney Dangerfield in a tutu and cross him with Zombie Joseph Stalin and you’d get something that not only is hard to visualize, but also doesn’t resemble me in the least. See you there!