atomicbird

OK, the rumor that Coldplay would play the WWDC bash tonight was off. Instead it was Barenaked Ladies, which as far as I'm concerned was even better. Ever since the iTunes music store started taking off, the bands at WWDC have been better known. In recent years we've had the Wallflowers, BT, and Ozomatli.

The band made a great match to the crowd, not just because they're talented and funny but also because they're dedicated Mac-heads playing to a crowd of the same. Not many bands would crack jokes about Apple-related stuff ranging from the Newton to Mac OS X 10.6, and not many crowds would respond so well to that kind of thing. Long, bizarre stories about the questionable content of semi-celebrity iTunes playlists? Check, and just the kind of thing the crowd would love.

For some reason EDGE data was severely off its game in the park where the bash was held, so my pictures were not quite so live as I would have hoped. I'm surprised there's anywhere in San Francisco not completely blanketed with wireless data coverage. At home it wouldn't have surprised me, but here? Next people will be telling me there aren't really hills in this city.

It was a musical day, as earlier one of the technical sessions featured James Dempsey continuing his tradition of geeky song performances. And I mean that in the best possible way-- the songs aren't on the schedule, but word gets around, and a good portion of the audience at this session was there solely to see Dempsey. This year's song was the Latin-inspired "Designated Initializer". If you write Mac software you'll know what the title refers to, and if you don't, it'd take too long to explain here.

I recorded a bootleg copy of Dempsey's song with Chris Liscio's excellent TapeDeck app. But I didn't have a microphone, and the built-in mic on the MacBook Pro doesn't exactly live up to the "pro" designation. If I can get the recording cleaned up enough I'll be posting it here.

Tomorrow's the last day of WWDC. It's not quite a full day, ending at 3:15, but there are some good sessions on the schedule. Keep an eye on Flickr for updates as they happen.

Tonight was Stump the Experts, the Mac geek game/comedy audience participation show now in its 17th incarnation as a venerable WWDC tradition. It's now almost as old as some of the student developers here.

Tom Dowdy

The evening started on an uncharacteristically serious note. Earlier this year Tom Dowdy unexpectedly passed away. He had been, among other things, a longtime member of the experts panel at Stump. Fred and Mark started off with a tribute to Dowdy, telling stories from having known him. Instead of a moment of silence, Fred asked for a few moments of over the top enthusiastic applause. The crowd responded with gusto.

The Music

This year I unfortunately did not resume my winning streak of picking up prizes by recognizing songs played before the game began (I could have sworn one of the songs was Miles Davis, but alas it was not). But therein lies an interesting and geeky tale that might just signal the end of this category.

In the past I've won in this category the old fashioned way. Which is to say, I tried to recognize the songs, sometimes running through possibilities on my iPod to confirm the answer. And of course if that failed it was off to Google with excerpts of the lyrics, and to the iTunes store to check on songs not already in my library. Sometimes it worked, sometimes not.

I might not have another chance though, because Rich Wardwell of Landmark Digital showed up with a complete category killer for the music-ID portion of the game. Landmark is a subsidiary of BMI, which makes its money collecting and processing royalties for public performance of recorded music. To do this it helps to be able to quickly identify music when you hear it

What's the point of all that? The point is that Rich has an iPhone app which listens to music for a few seconds, runs a fingerprinting algorithm, and finds the song and artist information from their database. Rich got six of the seven songs this way, missing only the one that I thought I knew but didn't.

This being Stump the Experts, there's no such thing as cheating (you're allowed to use any and all resources at your disposal). In fact the judges were very impressed and awared Rich the top prize of the evening, a boxed copy of the full Adobe CS3 suite. (I don't know which of the 20 or so versions it was, but the box was big and heavy enough that Rich had trouble carrying it).

By next year I expect half the audience will have Rich's software or something like it.

The Pork Brains

If you read my writeup of WWDC 2007 you'll know about the Pork Brains. This year the saga continued, as several people arrived with sporks offering to eat the brains in exchange for prizes. Mark scared most of them off just by describing the alleged food item, but one persisted. He and Mark went into private negotiation, presumably with Mark seeking guarantees that they guy wouldn't sue if the brains' 1000+% of the daily recommended limit on cholesterol caused him to keel over.

Eventually they reached some kind of agreement, and Mark offered the guy a titanium spork to do the honors. But then they opened the can, and its stench wafted over the stage. Mark then disposed of it and awarded the guy a prize for winning what Mark described as a game of intellectual chicken in which he had swerved first. He also threw in the titanium spork, though it turned out the guy already had one.

The Mysterious Comment

Also on my writeup of Stump '07, someone last week left a mysterious, anonymous comment suggesting that I should go up to one of the microphones at Stump and say a certain something. "Trust me", they said. I was a bit hesitant to get up in front of a couple of thousand people and say something just because some random guy on the internet said it was a good idea, but I decided to give it a try. I didn't get the chance though, as time ran out before I got to the front of the line. Afterward I asked Fred and Mark about it. Mark knew what it was about but only said to make sure I was first in line next year, so we'll see what happens then. I deleted the suggested comment from the Stump '07 writeup so that I don't have 20 people finding it in Google and all of them trying it.

Other Random Bits

• One of Fred's kids asked a question of the audience again this year. This time it was "How many candy bars does the audience have to give me to get a point?" Lots and lots, apparently, because that's how many were immediately delivered, and I'm not sure any points resulted.
• An example of the obscure, difficult questions that get asked: Someone asked what two sounds were hidden in Hypercard 1.0 but were removed in later releases. The experts asked the product manager for Hypercard at the time and some other people but nobody knew. It turned out to be two "very illegal" samples- "Hey" and "Jude" from the Beatles song, which the asker had found using ResEdit.
• A visual question from the experts was to identify two unmarked circuit boards. The relatively easy answer (relatively being the operative word) was the motherboard from a Mac Quadra 840AV (circa 1993). The harder one took several guesses, earning the experts a point for every wrong one, and turned out to be a prototype video overlay board for an Apple II (circa, what, 1981?).
• Another question had an audio clue, with the challenge being to identify it. It was a loud clacking noise. Turns out it was the sounds of an Apple II floppy disk drive calibrating itself by repeatedly whacking the drive head against the stop at one end of its area of motion (a trick Steve Wozniak came up with so that the drive would cost "only" $499 instead of 2-3x as much).

Moving along... Tonight is the annual WWDC Bash (no longer the "campus" bash since Apple decided hiring 8 billion charter buses was too expensive). Rumor has it that this year the band is Coldplay. We'll see.

In case you haven't noticed yet, the parade of WWDC photos has resumed. If you're at WWDC you probably know the reason for the interruption. If you're not, well, I could tell you but I'd have to kill you. You could watch my Twitter feed and try to guess what goes in place of "[REDACTED]", but of course I couldn't possibly comment on whether you guessed right.

Yesterday was divided between great technical sessions, and me skipping sessions to pump the iPhone team for answers. Both worked out pretty well. Evening events started (for me) with the now-annual very special CocoaHeads meeting at the nearby Apple store. As with last year the format consisted of a series of short presentations from independent Mac developers, followed by Q&A.

The most interesting part of CocoaHeads was the presentation by one of the guys from 280 North (unfortunately I didn't catch his name). These are the guys responsible for 280 Slides, a web-based clone of Apple's Keynote. And it's good. Really good. If you think web apps mostly suck, you need to check out this site, because it's just amazing. They've basically ported Apple's Cocoa to the web, so that Cocoa-style Mac development suddenly becomes web app development, and with the same look and feel you'd expect in a native app. There's been a fair amount of hype about it but it seems to me there hasn't been enough. This technology has the potential to completely change the game for web apps, making them as good as what you might otherwise buy a Mac to get. This is a technology to watch-- and as it's going to be open-sourced, it'll spread well beyond their site.

Afterward I made my way to the Ars Technica / Gizmodo party. I didn't stay long-- it was too crowded and loud, and I was too hungry, so instead I went and had Thai food (again) with Lemont Washington.

Time for the first session to start. More later.

If you've been following my Flickr photos from WWDC you may have noticed a slowdown today. I don't think I can say exactly why without violating a nondisclosure agreement, so I'll just say that due to technical issues beyond my control I'm not currently able to use the iPhone app I've been working on. I'm not sure exactly what went wrong, but I'm sure someone in either Apple's iPhone team or web team is feeling a little embarrassed right about now.

Today was the day everyone had been speculating over, Steve Jobs' magic show where he reaches into his hat and pulls out the latest iRabbit. The faster, cheaper iPhone was welcomed and (since everyone saw it coming a mile away) helped cement the rumor mill as a reliable source. Except for the bit about mysterious shipments from one of Apple's manufacturers, since it'll be a month or so until the phone ships. At the same time, the revelation of the new MobileMe service and the plan for Mac OS X "Snow Leopard" also featured prominently in pre-conference rumors.

Word is that the new phones will have to be activated in-store at purchase time (no online activation), which means that day 1 at the Apple and AT&T stores is going to absolutely suck.

Crowds being what they are this year, even Apple staff was advising that if you wanted to get into the main keynote hall, you'd want to arrive by 5AM (for a 10AM show). I made it by about 5:45, way earlier than I usually crawl out of bed, and met up with some friends who had thankfully made it there earlier than me. I could have slept in and gone to one of the overflow rooms, but I didn't travel this far and pay this much to get in so that I can watch the show on television.

The keynote was a little odd, in that it contained an extended demo of Xcode (Apple's main software development tool). Of course it is a developer conference, but in recent years the keynote has aimed more toward product and service announcements than to developer tools. Eventually they got around to the phone and the crowd started waving credit cards in the air.

Apparently in the overflow rooms, people don't clap. That tells me that Jobs' famed reality distortion field does not penetrate walls.

This evening was the traditional Buzz Andersen Monday night WWDC party, at 111 Minna again. Unfortunately there was no food, the taco truck apparently being unavailable, so several of us left early and got Thai food. Though I'm not normally a party person I'm making the most of these events. Craig Hockenberry drew a small crowd with a demo of an iPhone version of Twitterriffic.

Tomorrow the main technical sessions get underway. In preparation I'm currently skipping the pre-release version of Snow Leopard in favor of upgrading my iPhone developer tools to the new beta released today. I brought an extra hard drive just for Snow Leopard use but I'm not sure I'll use it this week. I'm still uploading a bunch of photos to Flickr, so if you'd like a to see what's up in something like real time, check them out.