I didn’t get to post this until this morning as my hotel wireless doesn’t work and I chose to go out last night.

Anyway, the first day was pretty good.

There was lunch following the keynote. I didn’t know for sure if there was going to be food, but it appears that the high-priced entry ticket includes all you can eat/drink throughout the day. I ate with several guys(Aaron and Curtis) that I meant standing in line all morning. They were both here for the IT track and worked for educational institutions.

After lunch, there were several more ‘state of the union’ speeches. The first was for Max OSX. There was a lot of information there, but I have to admit that I nodded off in a couple sections (probably due to a mix of the jet lag and food coma). Things of note:

• Apple thinks multiple threads are bad and that you should use GCD(Grand Central Distribution) along with this block concept. Perhaps they read the Knuth essay that says parallelism is bad because it makes algorithms hard (paraphrasing).
• Snow leopard will be out in a year. No new features and will incorporate all the slimmed down QuickTime stack that has already been used for the iphone/ipod
• System apps will be 64-bit compatible
• etc. I didn’t take notes, but I’m sure there were a couple other items

The second was for the development tool set. There was a lot of rah-rah about how xcode was the best IDE because it was so integrated. I might start to sing the same song if I can find keyboard equivalents for all the things that I can do so effortlessly in Intellij (eg goto a class). The one thing of note I will say is that developing web apps that look native on the iphone appears to now be effortless.

The third was for graphics and media; however, I skipped it to check out the open labs session to see ‘how it all worked’. And it was a good thing, too. I learned that I was actually supposed to sign up for certain labs so that I could have 1:1 time. So, I have an ‘Interface Design’ session today and an ‘App Store’ session tomorrow. Should be educational.

At 6:15, security came through the lab and said in not so many words: “get out and go to the party so that we can close out this area”. So, off to the ‘party’. It was a bit of a mess: extremely crowded, everybody waiting for the food line, and the food was very appetizer-ish. I met some other people(Heidi, Jake, Mike, John) and we went to a ‘real party’. It was a bar called Gallery 111 which contained paintings, some sculptures and drinks. Apparently, this was agreed upon ‘after party’ so there were Apple faithful in abundance. It always amazes me to see a crowded bar on a Monday night. I suspect that the place expects this kind of thing with all the conventions that happen around here.