Wednesday at WWDC
I managed to make it up to San Francisco for WWDC yesterday, just in time to see what surely must have been the coolest day of the conference so far. Even though I was aware of the existence of technologies like the Core Data and Spotlight frameworks well in advance of the conference, and therefore had become somewhat blasé toward them, hearing specific details from their developers really got me fired up about them all over again. I think Dominic Giampaolo’s Spotlight demo, in particular, did a much better job than the keynote of conveying the possibilities of Tiger’s new extensible metadata file system. It’s too bad more people couldn’t have seen it.
In addition to the WWDC sessions, I also decided to take a quick trip across the street to JavaOne to talk to Dan Wood about his work with Sun on Project Alameda. I’m a fan of Watson (I use it essentially every time I want to know what’s on TV or in theaters), so naturally I was a little disappointed to hear it would be discontinued in its current, Mac-native incarnation. Still, I’m glad to hear that Dan got some investment in his technology and Sun got a nice example of Java on the desktop out of the deal.
The day finished with Fraser Speirs’ excellent RSS/Syndication birds-of-a-feather session, which saw Safari RSS developers Jens Alfke and Sarah Wilkin finally meeting their public—not to mention a cadre of third-party RSS application developers (including Brent Simmons, Fraser himself, Andrei Tapolow, PulpFiction representative Scott Stevenson, and Joe Pezzillo).
The conversation was fairly open-ended, and ranged from bewildered outsider queries about why people read weblogs in the first place to ruminations on the possibility of enclosing multimedia binary data in RSS feeds. For me, though, the biggest lesson of the evening was that, due to its relative simplicity, RSS is a fairly universal syndication format that can be lots of different things to different people, and that no single RSS app can satisfy everybody. Because of this, I personally believe that apps like NetNewsWire, PulpFiction, and Shrook, with their divergent approaches to syndication, all still have important roles to play on the Mac platform in the post-Safari RSS era. I look forward to seeing small, agile developers continue to surprise us with innovation in the RSS space.
Never one to forget my duty as an obsessive documentarian, I did manage to snap a few photos of this historic meeting of the RSS minds, and here they are…