- Sunday, June 27th
22.36h PDT - Tosj | Sunday, finally our first day at the conference! At 7.15h I woke up, for the second time this week caused by Alex who was taking a shower. Of course I got out of bed too quite soon after he finished and at 8.00h sharp we were on the road to go to our first WWDC conference. During registration we had to sign an agreement with Apple on the computing and publishing part of the conference. We are not allowed to take pictures inside the Moscone center, we did once during lunch, that was OK, but because of the agreement you will not find as much pictures here as from the last few days.
Once registered we got a huge bag from Apple, a black backpack ready to soak up any laptop computer, even a 17 inch Powerbook, although you will have to go searching for your 12 inch iBook or PowerBook in every corner... The bag further contained 2 t-shirts: one gray Apple WWDC 2004 shirt and one white student developer shirt with a white velpro (klittenband) band on the chest. Sam Jacobs explained later that this was for the student career reception and that you should put on your own text using letters supplied by Apple. Furthermore there was a conference guide and some coupons for the Apple Store and for Apple Software discounts during WWDC 04.
After the registration we had breakfast supplied by Apple and got ready for the first round. In the entrance of the Moscone center is what seems a huge new commercial wrapped up in black curtain with security standing besides it all day. We think it will be uncovered during or just after tomorrows Keynote by Steve Jobs. We cannot wait! Furthermore on the 2nd floor a BMW and a Mini (also BMW) are in the middle of the hall where also some huge commercials are placed about Tiger, the 10.4 version of Mac OS X. The cars are put there because of the integration of the iPod with the BMWs.
At 9.00h we had an introduction by speakers Sam Jacobs and Eric Seidel, a former WWDC student now working for Apple. They gave brief introductions about the conference, what to expect from it and what not to expect from it. Eric also gave a brief summary on how he became an Apple employee, but later on the day it turned out that there are many ways and that not everybody will end up at Apple, but no worries, there are more places to go. When the introduction finished, we were divided in two groups, beginners and more experienced programmers, so I remained seated at the beginners session... Alex went to the other session. My session was by James Davidson, the writer of the 'Learning Cocoa' book Alex used to learn Objective-C and also the book I am trying to master. Because of my very basal knowledge of programming, the session was quite magical to me, although I could understand most of the parts James was mentioning, I had too few knowledge of the basic coding to really get it. (Like you just understood a french conversation, but you don't know how to respond). One of the main things he mentioned was never to use abbreviations, this will mess up, especially when you are working in a group.
From 12.00 to 13.20h we had time for lunch and it turned out that we as biologists are really the odd ones out, because the rest of the people at our table were informatics, computer science or real mathematics students... Each time we told other people we were biologists they would gaze more or less at us, like: what are you two doing here? That was quite fun but you realize that you normally could see all these computer people as nerds, so now it seamed more like a kind of group therapy. During lunch many laptops were on the table, almost all titanium/alluminium PowerBooks and new iBooks, although there were also older PowerBooks like my bronze G3 and even an old colorful 'clamp shell' iBook. So it was a very mixed population, I think more or less the same a 2 blocks further where the Gay Pride Parade was going on, although we completely missed it.
In the afternoon we had to do some coding in small groups. I told the guys from my group immediately that I had no programming experience at all, but they managed quite good without me and got the assignment working with the four of them. At 16.00 h we had our last session by Will Stein, Vice President of Apple's Professional Applications. He talked about the Pro Apps like Final Cut Pro and Motion. The last one was demonstrated by Charles Migos and was very smooth on the 2x 2 GHz G5 he used.
From 19.00h till 21.00h we had the student career reception going on in the Marriot hotel. It was a cool reception, although there were not that much letters with velpro on the back, so it was hard to make the white T-shirt with your own text. We hang around and informed at several 'stands' about possible scientific programming of the different companies. That was not such a great success, although we met some people that used 4 Peaks. When we were asking around for people from Apple of the advanced computing group, we were told that we at least not tonight would be able to meet one of them. We did meet Suzanna Mooring, from her we got the e-mail about the design awards. So we spoke a little more about our programs and the work we are doing in the Neefix group at the NKI in Amsterdam. After that we went home to have another drink and to update the website.- 23.00h PDT - Mek | Once separated from Tom, I had to go the room next door where a somewhat more advanced Cocoa talk was given by Malcolm Crawford. Without going into details, we learned all about using bindings to make programming a lot easier. This guy has a fantastic Oxford English accent, and a lot of humor. It was great fun, I can assure you! To illustrate the fact that he would first give a broad overview and later on go into detail, he used an example where he had blurred a picture of the golden gate bridge which gradually became sharper. The only thing was that while he was setting up his computer, everyone could already see that it was in fact the golden gate bridge from the little thumbnails besides the slides, but he didn't know of course. So when he showed the blurred picture and ask the audience if we could see what it was, he was completely surprised that someone said "the golden gate bridge", that was a great laugh! Later on we spoke him at the career reception and told him the reason why we knew, I guess he won't be making that mistake again ;-)
After the talks we had to code ourselves. I was in group 47, together with Martin Pittenauer from the coding monkeys we already met in the plane, two guys from the states, and a guy from Zˆºrich. We had a great time trying to tackle the project we had been assigned, difficult, but we managed to get something done, and upload our results in the last minute....
