- Friday, July 2nd
22.11h PDT - Mek | Ahhhh, the last day already!?!! It was such a great WWDC and now it's over already, so sad.. But what a last day it was! Still tired from yesterday's adventures, we woke up a bit late, but quickly we found ourselves on the 5 minute walk to the Moscone center again... Tom and I split up and visited different sessions. I went to see what all the new features for Tiger on XML processing are, boy this promises something. I can't wait to build a reincarnation of LabAssistant that leverages all the new Cocoa features that we have seen in the past week!
Next up was the round-the-table discussion in the Science Lounge for which we were invited by Apple's Robert Kehrer, as winners of the Design Awards. We had a nice discussion on how to build great scientific apps on MacOSX. We also met Simon Bovet, the runner up for the student Design Awards. This friendly guy from Switzerland together with his brother has made a number of awesome programs for MacOSX. If you have not yet checked out his program Curvus Pro, you should definitely pay a visit to his website. Later we again met Jean-Matthieu Schaffhauser, who was also a runner up for the design awards in the opensource category, with his cocoa front end to pure-FTPd.
The last afternoon of the conference was all cocoa: a session on the Cocoa text system, one on Apple Scripting, and one on Cocoa Performance Techniques. The latter was really great and I learned a number of things that I will certainly use in the upcoming release of EnzymeX. And that was the WWDC2004, well maybe not quite yet....
Unfortunately, we didn't win the dashboard contest, but when Tom went to get the 4Peaks poster that had hung at Level 2, he walked into a guy from Apple who we met at the Design Awards design ceremony. After Tom told him we had send in Tigergotchi, he replied that he could remember our submission and that we had ended up as THIRD!! Almost another prize! Right now, we can't put the gadget on our website as it's all under the non-disclosure agreement, but when Tiger is finally released you can download it (Disclaimer: it can be addictive!).
Down the escalator to the exit of the Moscone center, we met Peter again, and with him was a guy from Apple Belgium, and Bram Elderman from Apple Netherlands and their guests. I have met Bram once back in 1998 when he introduced the original Bondi blue iMac in The Netherlands (wow, that's a long time ago!). He had been looking for us during the WWDC, but with 3500 other developers around it's quite hard to find somebody I can assure you. He invited us to join the group for dinner. First we went together to the nearby Apple Store in San Francisco, where we again ran into Aaron Hillegass, writer of some fantastic books on Cocoa programming. After the shopping, we went for dinner in a nice jazz restaurant around the corner. It was lots of fun, talking about all the new stuff we had seen at the WWDC. It's now officially over, it was awesome, and I can't wait to return for WWDC 2005 (if finances are OK) and also play more with Tiger once we return next week....
