There have been reports lately of Apple holding a secret conference for iOS developers. Now, let me just state up front so there's no misunderstanding: Other than the normal news outlets, I haven't heard any information about such a conference - I'm certainly not invited if there is such a thing going on. This post is just conjecture on my part.
But I'm not sure why this is news. Apple constantly has strategically important developers (and other partners, like wireless carriers) out to Cupertino to work on future product announcements and to be informed about future products. It certainly shouldn't be news to anyone that the people who get up on stage with Steve at keynotes and presentations (plus everybody involved behind the scenes) knew ahead of time that they would be doing so.
If you follow a lot of iOS developers, you'll pick up subtle hints about when some of them are on campus or on their way there. It might just be a "Wheels down SFO" tweet, a comment about the food at Caffe Macs (the cafeteria at 1 Infinite Loop which is quite excellent), or a dinner with certain Apple employees, but the signs are there if you know what to look for.
Unsurprisingly, Apple is just as careful about keynotes as it is with everything else. As a result there are constant "summits" going on in the weeks before any public announcement. Since Apple now spreads their product announcements around the calendar year, that means it's an almost constant ebb and flow of strategic partners.
The process to be involved with a keynote presentation is long, stressful, and involves many trips to Cupertino. I can't say anything more specific about the process without betraying confidences (I've never been directly involved myself), but rest assured that despite Apple's famous secrecy, if you're at all involved with the developer community, then there are likely people outside Apple whom you've socialized with who knew a fair bit about certain products before they were released. Even people who aren't directly involved with a keynote presentation have to, at times, find out information about products early, and in some cases even get access to pre-release hardware (though usually with strong precautions talem to keep photos or other info from leaking).
If this is a surprise to you, chalk that up to the fact that the third party developers who are involved understand and respect Apple's desire for secrecy and want to continue being involved with the process. Apple is not known for being forgiving to those who leak information of that nature.
So, is there something even larger than normal going on next week, perhaps a replacement for the Tech Talk World Tours of past years? I don't know. It's absolutely possible. But, what seems more likely to me is that Business Insider simply got a whiff of information about an ongoing process and interpreted it incorrectly. Apple is never idle, and we're less than a month away from 4.2 being publicly released. It's altogether possible (I'd say likely) that there will be hardware or other software announcements that will coincide with release of 4.2.
Frankly, I'd find it far more surprising if there wasn't a flurry of third-party developers going in and out of Cupertino right now and for the next few weeks. Whether it's a formal summit of any size, I don't know, but I have my doubts. The more people involved with something like that, the harder it is to keep it secret and the more likely a leak is. Right now everything I can find online leads back to the original Business Insider story. Despite requests for anonymous information, no new information seems to have come out.
My bets are on business-as-usual pre-announcement activity, not some secret conference. If it is a secret conference, the participants are likely only the most strategically important partners: people who have been involved with pre-release products previously.
Showing posts with label Conference. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conference. Show all posts
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Saturday, June 19, 2010
WWDC 2010 Post Mortem
WWDC. The Dubdub. Christmas in June.
If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know Apple's annual developer conference is my absolute favorite week of the year, and it just seems to get better every year. For the days leading up to leaving for San Francisco, I'm like a kid on Christmas eve. I can't sleep from excitement and the time passes way too slowly.
Every year, there are less "must-see" technical sessions for me, personally. That was especially true this year because something like 60% of the attendees were first timers who haven't shipped their first app yet and the session schedule was designed accordingly, with quite a few beginner and intermediate level sessions. But WWDC is so much more than the sessions (and those come out on video anyway). Your first year or two attending, it's all about the sessions, but by this point for me, it's about the sessions that focus on new technologies, labs and, most importantly, a chance to catch up with people I only see once or twice a year. Well, it wasn't just new technology sessions. For obvious reasons, I also attended all of the OpenGL ES sessions this year, and they were great. They were much deeper technically than last year, and were much more focused on the OpenGL ES 2.0 programmable pipeline.
Even thought it was the same number of attendees as the last two years (5,200 attendees plus the various engineers and other staff), this year felt way busier than past years. Lines to get into sessions were often very long, and many sessions filled up. Some even filled up an overflow room. Although we've seen long lines for sessions going back to the introduction of the iPhone, it's never been like this year. Last year, for example, for the State of the Union addresses, I meandered into the overflow room ten minutes late and found a seat in one of several empty rows. This year, I sat on the floor of the overflow room for the overflow rooms. I guess that's good - people were serious about learning this year.
One negative aspect of the massive influx of newbs this year was a certain loss of etiquette. I've always been super impressed by the way my fellow WWDC geeks treat the staff and the facilities. I've never seen garbage left around or more than isolated cases of people being rude to the catering or cleaning staff. This year, unfortunately, that respect was somewhat lacking. During the keynote line, hundreds of people just left their litter laying around on the floor. It was really disgusting and I was embarrassed at that moment to be part of the group. And it didn't end with the keynote line, either, unfortunately. I saw many examples of people not bothering to pick up after themselves, or being rude to the staff. Even a few instance of people being rude to Apple engineers who were trying to help them with problems. I almost feel like I need to add a few items to my annual first timer's guide with things I had assumed any decent person would already know, like throw out your garbage, treat people with respect, and be nice to people who are trying to help you.
Let's be better next year, okay? Almost everybody I met or talked to seemed like super people, so I'm hoping this was just a one-time anomaly. I really, really would like it to be an isolated occurrence. Enough said on that topic.
Although the new iPhone 4 was the belle of the keynote ball, the real buzz at WWDC this year, as you probably know by now, was Xcode 4. For the first time in history, Apple has released the session videos to all registered developers for free, so if you haven't done so yet, you should go watch the Developer Tools State of the Union and the handful of Xcode 4 sessions. Apple's Developer Tools teams have been working really hard for quite a long time on this upcoming release, and even in the early preview state it's in, I already wish I could use it full-time. Fortunately, the Xcode team foresaw this and they made the project file format 100% backwards and forwards compatible between Xcode 3 and Xcode 4, so I can work in Xcode 4 then switch to Xcode 3 to do my ad hoc and release builds.
Honestly, one of my favorite parts of this particular WWDC was having the opportunity to buy a few rounds of drinks for some of the engineers who worked on Xcode 4. I'm not sure if those engineers have forgiven me yet, so I'm not going to call them out by name, but it's important to me during WWDC to show my appreciation to as many as I can of the people who make all the cool stuff I work with everyday. Steve Jobs gets a lot of credit, and rightly so, but he doesn't do it alone. It was really nice to see him call out some of the people who worked on iPhone 4 and iOS 4 during the keynote, but there are a lot of unsung heroes working at Apple, and most of them don't get a lot of recognition for teh awesome they bring. WWDC is the one week a year where we get to show our appreciation in person.
The User Experience lab appeared to be the biggest hit among the labs this year. Each morning, within minutes of the Moscone West doors opening up, there was a long line extending around the corner waiting for the UX lab to open. People waited in line literally for hours to get a UX review. I guess word got out this year about how good those reviews were. I know I saw several people raving about them last year. In general, I think people have really started to grok the fact that the labs represent an incredible opportunity to get questions answered by the people who really know the answers. If you're having a problem or an issue with a certain part of the system, likely you can find someone who actually works on that part of the system to answer your questions.
As for MartianCraft, we gave out all of our away team shirts pretty quickly this year. Sorry to those who wanted one but didn't get one. We way underestimated demand for the shirts and just didn't have enough with us to give them to everyone who wanted one. We'll be better prepared next year, and we're looking into making the shirts available online for anybody who's interested, but that probably won't happen until we've dug ourselves out from the hole that got created as a result of all three of us not working for a week.
If you've followed this blog for any length of time, you know Apple's annual developer conference is my absolute favorite week of the year, and it just seems to get better every year. For the days leading up to leaving for San Francisco, I'm like a kid on Christmas eve. I can't sleep from excitement and the time passes way too slowly.
Every year, there are less "must-see" technical sessions for me, personally. That was especially true this year because something like 60% of the attendees were first timers who haven't shipped their first app yet and the session schedule was designed accordingly, with quite a few beginner and intermediate level sessions. But WWDC is so much more than the sessions (and those come out on video anyway). Your first year or two attending, it's all about the sessions, but by this point for me, it's about the sessions that focus on new technologies, labs and, most importantly, a chance to catch up with people I only see once or twice a year. Well, it wasn't just new technology sessions. For obvious reasons, I also attended all of the OpenGL ES sessions this year, and they were great. They were much deeper technically than last year, and were much more focused on the OpenGL ES 2.0 programmable pipeline.
Even thought it was the same number of attendees as the last two years (5,200 attendees plus the various engineers and other staff), this year felt way busier than past years. Lines to get into sessions were often very long, and many sessions filled up. Some even filled up an overflow room. Although we've seen long lines for sessions going back to the introduction of the iPhone, it's never been like this year. Last year, for example, for the State of the Union addresses, I meandered into the overflow room ten minutes late and found a seat in one of several empty rows. This year, I sat on the floor of the overflow room for the overflow rooms. I guess that's good - people were serious about learning this year.
One negative aspect of the massive influx of newbs this year was a certain loss of etiquette. I've always been super impressed by the way my fellow WWDC geeks treat the staff and the facilities. I've never seen garbage left around or more than isolated cases of people being rude to the catering or cleaning staff. This year, unfortunately, that respect was somewhat lacking. During the keynote line, hundreds of people just left their litter laying around on the floor. It was really disgusting and I was embarrassed at that moment to be part of the group. And it didn't end with the keynote line, either, unfortunately. I saw many examples of people not bothering to pick up after themselves, or being rude to the staff. Even a few instance of people being rude to Apple engineers who were trying to help them with problems. I almost feel like I need to add a few items to my annual first timer's guide with things I had assumed any decent person would already know, like throw out your garbage, treat people with respect, and be nice to people who are trying to help you.
Let's be better next year, okay? Almost everybody I met or talked to seemed like super people, so I'm hoping this was just a one-time anomaly. I really, really would like it to be an isolated occurrence. Enough said on that topic.
Although the new iPhone 4 was the belle of the keynote ball, the real buzz at WWDC this year, as you probably know by now, was Xcode 4. For the first time in history, Apple has released the session videos to all registered developers for free, so if you haven't done so yet, you should go watch the Developer Tools State of the Union and the handful of Xcode 4 sessions. Apple's Developer Tools teams have been working really hard for quite a long time on this upcoming release, and even in the early preview state it's in, I already wish I could use it full-time. Fortunately, the Xcode team foresaw this and they made the project file format 100% backwards and forwards compatible between Xcode 3 and Xcode 4, so I can work in Xcode 4 then switch to Xcode 3 to do my ad hoc and release builds.
Honestly, one of my favorite parts of this particular WWDC was having the opportunity to buy a few rounds of drinks for some of the engineers who worked on Xcode 4. I'm not sure if those engineers have forgiven me yet, so I'm not going to call them out by name, but it's important to me during WWDC to show my appreciation to as many as I can of the people who make all the cool stuff I work with everyday. Steve Jobs gets a lot of credit, and rightly so, but he doesn't do it alone. It was really nice to see him call out some of the people who worked on iPhone 4 and iOS 4 during the keynote, but there are a lot of unsung heroes working at Apple, and most of them don't get a lot of recognition for teh awesome they bring. WWDC is the one week a year where we get to show our appreciation in person.
The User Experience lab appeared to be the biggest hit among the labs this year. Each morning, within minutes of the Moscone West doors opening up, there was a long line extending around the corner waiting for the UX lab to open. People waited in line literally for hours to get a UX review. I guess word got out this year about how good those reviews were. I know I saw several people raving about them last year. In general, I think people have really started to grok the fact that the labs represent an incredible opportunity to get questions answered by the people who really know the answers. If you're having a problem or an issue with a certain part of the system, likely you can find someone who actually works on that part of the system to answer your questions.
As for MartianCraft, we gave out all of our away team shirts pretty quickly this year. Sorry to those who wanted one but didn't get one. We way underestimated demand for the shirts and just didn't have enough with us to give them to everyone who wanted one. We'll be better prepared next year, and we're looking into making the shirts available online for anybody who's interested, but that probably won't happen until we've dug ourselves out from the hole that got created as a result of all three of us not working for a week.
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