- Tuesday, June 29th
23.56h PDT - Tosj | WE LIKE ILLUMINATING CUBES! We actually won the Apple Design Award (ADA) in the Student category!
This is SO cool! Being a finalist OK, but actually winning the award, just great. We knew we were finalists, so we did feel some adrenaline rushing through our bodies all day, but you just keep looking at the light of the cube hoping that you don't wake up...
This morning we got up at 6.45h because we had an iChat appointment with MacFan so after the daily shower we had the 3 person iChat conversation and did some explanation about our program 4Peaks, but it was fun and we have another appointment later to talk about a report of the WWDC and the ADA ceremony.
After the usual chat with the girlfriends we got on the way to the Moscone Center again. We had a small breakfast and were scanned for our first session: Apple and Scientific Computing. As expected there was a lot about cluster computing, but it was also nice that they showed that Apple is doing more and more in science, like advertisements in Nature and Science; on-line adds; Apple on-tour and a subdirectory of apple.com dedicated to science. For the WWDC there is also a special science lounge opened for 9.00 h to 17.00h with roundtable discussions during lunch time.
The second session for me was 'Distinguish Your Application Through Excellent Design', while Alex went to the Automator session. Both sessions had interesting features for our present programs and for some that are still slumbering in the grey mass of our heads... After lunch we went for Quartz 2D, Intro to Xcode, PDFkit and the new stuff in Cocoa, so you might find cool new and/or smoothed programs. Of course if you have feedback on our programs, please mail us, we won't bite. During the lunch discussion we also met Peter Schols, a Belgian guy from the university of Leuven who has made this great framework for reading and writing sequence files called BioCocoa. We would love to use this framework in our applications and we will certainly discuss how to implement more formats.
All the cool stuff convinced us NOT to leave the conference tomorrow for the semi final soccer match of the Netherlands against Portugal for Euro 2004! It would cost us another 20 dollar, but that was no problem, the conference is SO cool and we haven't even talked about stump the experts! But before that we had dinner (pizza slices) and went to the 2nd Widget development session, which was repeated because of too much interest in the morning! We have some ideas about a widget and we will try to have it ready on time for the bash. Then it was time for THE ADA, at that time it was quite nerve wrecking to see so many people gathering for the event. We were only told that we had to be in the audience, and so we did. We were told that only the winners were allowed to pick up their award immediately, the runner ups had to come forward after the show. All this was because this year the ADA and the stump the experts events were scheduled on the same day. And that was again because of the busy program.
It took quite a while before we reached the Student awards, tension was building and when the runner up, Simon Bovet with his program Curvus Pro X, was announced we couldn't believe that we actually won. But within a minute later our names were projected on the same screen Steve Jobs presented the keynote yesterday and the stumbling on how to pronounce the names began! Within another minute the award was given to Alexander and we were walking back to our seats. Completely stunned we could here some people congratulating us from the audience although not really hearing it.
After informing the family at home by mail we attended the rest of the ceremony and were shown some really funny Quicktime movies at the end. Then we had to go and sign a paper were to send the prizes: one 17 inch PowerBook and one 23 inch Cinema display, although the last one will not be one of the display revealed during the keynote yesterday, bummer. A quick break later we found ourselves back in the stump the experts session. A really funny 'game' between experts from Apple and the audience to stump each other with questions about Apple. For questions not or wrongly answered by the experts the person with the question was allowed to get either swiss cheese, a cap or some other gadget. Really funny and a nice way to finish the day.
Now we are back at the hotel and drink a beer to celebrate, although we will drink more on that the next few days. We are going to get some sleep. Hope that smile is gone when I wake up, could give some serious pains in the yaws...
Greetz from Mek&Tosj.
REMARK: IF YOU HAVE PICTURES OF THE DESIGN AWARD CEREMONY, PLEASE MAIL US, we would be very grateful. The show has been recorded for Apple, but will not be available, so every picture is welcome.
