Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

I’ve been in San Francisco for a day and a half now and I’m already vividly remembering all of the reasons I’ve never been a big fan of the place. The omnipresent homeless population, the constant pleas for money, the smells, the grunge, the sheer cheesiness of Fisherman’s Wharf, the prevailing “do your own thing, even if it inconveniences others” attitude, the self-righteously liberal politics. I feel like standing in front of the mirror in my hotel room and performing something similar to Edward Norton’s “Fuck You, New York” monologue from 25th Hour!

Like Norton’s character, though, I would most likely realize by the end of my tirade that there are, in fact, a lot of things I like about the city. This evening I walked—and I do mean walked—from my hotel near Union Square clear over Nob Hill all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf (which I was visiting, despite my aversion to it, because it is home to San Francisco’s only In-N-Out Burger, and it just wouldn’t be a trip to California without a visit to my favorite indigenous fast food chain!). While the trip was arduous, it was also rewarding, in that it gave me feel for the city that I never quite got on my previous trip.

As Tom Coates pointed out during his last visit, SimCity seems to owe a lot of its aesthetic to San Francisco, and I think there’s a reason for that: if you were to build a city from scratch, the Bay Area is definitely one of the most interesting and naturally beautiful canvases you could ask for. Unlike, say, Denver (which is built on a huge, almost completely waterless plane and is therefore eminently uninteresting in terms of layout), San Francisco’s peninsular location, it’s hilly terrain, and surrounding bay (or estuary if you want to get technical) creates an incredible amount of geographical drama and necessitates awe-inspiring engineering achievements like the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Even looking at the apartment buildings clinging the precipitous hillside on Taylor Street this evening inspired in me something akin to vertigo!

It’s just too bad that, as James Duncan Davidson has said, the stunning natural setting of San Francisco Bay has to be ruined by “all the bad things that have layered on top of the city.” If only real life was more like SimCity—I’d love to put in one of those unlimited money cheat codes and give this place what it really deserves!

Well, here I am back in my apartment, reflecting on a week well spent. While it was great getting Panther, my free iSight, and the inside dope on Cocoa’s (and OS X’s) exciting future, I would still have to say that my favorite thing had to be the interesting people I got to meet. One of the things that amazed me about WWDC was that just about anyone I managed to strike up a conversation with was pretty interesting!

One evening, for example, I met Jonas Luster, who works for the UN and, as he tells it, had Kofi Annan using his iBook after the Secretary General’s VAIO laptop broke down (wouldn’t he be great material for a Switcher commercial?). It turns out Jonas also has the distinction of a low Winer number, a great legal mind (he has worked with Lawrence Lessig on his books of which, I am, of course, a great fan), and a nice weblog.

And then there’s Douglas Snow, Apple’s man in Maine, who I talked with on the bus back from the Apple Campus Thursday night. He told me all about what Apple is doing up there, and I must say I was amazed by the scope (we’re talking centralized NOCs with 20 terabyte Xserve RAIDs, baby!).

I even managed to corner Brent Simmons while he was enjoying a smoke on the Moscone West balcony—although he doesn’t seem like an overly talkative guy, so I pretty much told him I liked the fact that NetNewsWire 1.0.3 is smarter about updated (as opposed to new) items, and left him to his thoughts :-).

All in all, it was fun vacation to Mac geekdom, and a great opportunity to meet my peers. Now that I’m home, though, it’s time to get back to work—I’m already hearing reports of some PodWorks weirdness on the developer preview :-(!

Well, WWDC is officially over, and I’m now on a plane back to Denver. I’m happy to report, though, that today I finally had what I would call a nice day of sightseeing in San Francisco! I had some time to kill before my flight, and for practically the first day since I arrived the weather wasn’t oppressively hot, so I just took off walking east from Union Square to see what I could see. As it turned out, I ended up in Japantown, which, I have to say, was pretty cool!

I stopped for a Bento lunch, of course, but I think my favorite part of Japantown was the cool Japanese stores, which carry all sorts of interesting import items. I stopped at one called Ichiban Kan and perused their wares, which included not only a variety of Japanese foods, but also a profusion of mundane items such as toilet brushes (it’s beyond me why someone would feel the need to import toilet cleaning implements, but maybe the Japanese are actually years ahead of us in the bathroom!). I bought six boxes of Pocky (which I know by reputation) and assorted other candies—including a box of something called “Chelsea Yogurt Scotch,” which I wanted to show Matt Gemmell, since it purports to have “the taste of old Scotland!” You know those Scots and their yogurt :-)…

I’ve noticed that my favorite travel experiences are almost invariably the ones that are unplanned—like the time I changed my travel itinerary to go watch the sunrise at Stonehenge on the solstice—and today was certainly a good example of that. With that in mind, I think I’m going to try to leave more time for “unscripted” activities on future trips!

Here are a few more photos I took over the last few days of the WWDC conference (including the party at the Apple Campus!).

Apple’s huge banners dominated Moscone West.

Jaguar spots are so last year—metal is the new wave, baby!

Free Jamba Juice was one of the conference’s many perks.

Apple set up two Xserves as game servers.

The Campus Bash looked like “Macstock.”

I have no idea who the band was, but they sounded British…

The campus cafeteria was working overtime.

The line at the Company Store was daunting.

Apple’s Frameworks engineers met their public.

The FireWire plugfest was pretty much what it sounds like.

I have a confession to make—I missed the last day of WWDC sessions today just so I could take a jaunt down the 101 toward that fabled epicenter of the digital world, Silicon Valley. That’s right—rather than get the dope on “Advanced WebKit APIs” and NSTextView’s strange new abilities, I pointed my big (rented) American car south, cranked the Gemma Hayes CD I just bought (I’m madly in love with her, incidentally—Gemma, will you marry me?) and roared past exit after familiar sounding exit. Menlo Park—that’s where all the VC’s are (bastards!)! Redwood City—that’s where @Home…ahem…was! Mountain View—that’s where Sun is! Palo Alto—that’s where Stanford is! Cupertino—well, you all know that one :-).

It was a fairly pleasant trip (the 101’s severe traffic problems notwithstanding), but I have to admit I came away from it rather unimpressed. Anyone expecting to find a technological fantasyland in the Santa Clara Valley will be sorely disappointed. Aside from the Apple Campus (which is incredible—it’s like Disneyland for Mac geeks!) and the Tech Museum (which, unfortunately, was closed by the time I made it down to San Jose), there’s little to see aside from loads of non-descript office parks, hotels catering to business travelers, and suburban strip malls!

The lesson? Despite its storied history, there is really nothing that magical about Silicon Valley. A lot of people here are wondering if the area will ever regain its status as one of the centers of American power, but I think that question is irrelevant—thanks to the Internet, innovators need no longer flock to a single place—they can just as easily live in Glasgow, Florida, Seattle, or Portland as in Palo Alto. The time and place immortalized in Pirates of Silicon Valley may be gone, but there’s still plenty of innovation out there—I think it’s just going to be a lot more evenly distributed from now on!

• Every time I see a T-shirt, I want one! The Hydra people have cool Hydra shirts. I’ve seen Slava wearing a striking Unsanity shirt. The Panic people have their shirts (although those are already old hat, since I have one of my own from MacWorld). And when I met Corey from the IconFactory, he was wearing a very handsome light grey number with their distinctive “factory” logo. Everyone wears Apple apparel here at WWDC, so in my opinion it gives one a lot more “cred” to be sporting an indie developer shirt!

  (Update: I forgot to mention that people from the Australian Apple contingent are all wearing these cool Matrix-themed shirts. They say “WWDC” in the Matrix font on the front, and have the outline of Australia highlighted in a stream of Matrix digits on the back. I’ll try to snap a pic if I see another one…)

• The Apple Design Awards were a lot of fun, and many deserving developers were recognized. Hydra and Transmit are both, in my opinion, apps the exemplify what the Design Awards should be all about. My only complaint, personally, is that Transmit should have been the winner in its category—not runner up.

• I was going to leave during the QuickTime portion of the Design Awards, but I’m glad I stayed, since they turned out to be a lot of fun! Frank Casanova, Apple’s head of QuickTime marketing, is a hoot—he reminds me a lot of a college art professor (and I mean that in a good way!).

  It was really cool the way the crowd demanded to see the entire BMW film that won the top prize—that must have been a cool thing for the winners!

  Oh, and, as it happened, the QuickTime part of the show had a brilliant finish: the QuickTime player (running on the preview Panther build) crashed with a “QuickTime quit unexpectedly” error! That got quite a laugh from the audience (not a derisive one, though—we’re all developers here, after all!).

Wowee—I sure wish I wasn’t bound by this NDA, because I’ve seen a lot of things here at WWDC that make me very happy! This morning I attended the “Cocoa Update” session, which has really been the first session to delve deeply into Panther’s Cocoa changes, and it’s becoming pretty clear that a Panther-only release of PodWorks is all but unavoidable. There were just too many new things that made me say “Oh, I need that!” or “Oh, that would make life so much easier” or “That gives me an idea for a whole new feature!” I was like a kid in a candy store!

It’s taking all of my willpower to avoid launching into a laundry list of all the cool changes in store. I actually had one written, but thought better of posting it (which, I realize, makes this post rather irrelevant, but I’d rather not piss Apple off). Instead you’ll just have to take my word when I repeat that Panther will be a great release for developers!

There is one new feature (a significant one) that looks like it could be somewhat controversial to MVC fundamentalists (like myself). I’m still not sure what to think about it—it will be hard to tell what it’s impact on application design will be until I can actually see it used in a sample app.

For a long time I was waffling about whether I was going to install Panther or not (I haven’t yet), but after today I don’t think I’m going to be able to hold out any longer! Bugs and unimplemented features be damned—I’ve got new Cocoa to learn!

Robb Beal posted this morning regarding his fondest wish for Panther: that it be boring! As Robb said:

Here’s hoping Panther is one of the most boring OS upgrades in personal computing history! Faster boring. More compatible boring. Less buggy boring.

I said in my earlier post that I was relatively unimpressed with Panther, as demoed during the keynote, for exactly that reason: compared to Jaguar, it has very few flashy new features. The real question, then, is whether or not the other half of Robb’s equation proves true. Is boring really beautiful?

After sitting through an afternoon of presentations by Apple employees regarding Panther, I would have to say yes. The thing about Panther, you see, is that it is short on the sorts of features that “demo” well, and long on under-the-hood improvements. It seemed like nearly every new feature discussed this afternoon was some sort of optimization or new API designed to make developers’ lives easier. And that’s a good thing!

I guess I’m not supposed to talk much about all of this due to Apple’s NDA (and besides, it’s fun to be vague and mysterious!), but I will say that there are some fundamental changes in store for Cocoa, and that they should make application development even easier than it already is! Combine that with a variety of new APIs, new widgets, and a snazzy new development environment, and I think you’ve got a very winning proposition for Mac developers!

Speaking of Xcode, I would just like to reiterate that I think it will go a long way toward eliminating the things I hate about Project Builder. I still need to install it and play around a bit, but what I saw this afternoon looks very promising. My compliments to Apple for finally devoting the resources to make their developer tools world class!

Damn—it appears that Apple turned off the Airport connectivity during the keynote, so I wasn’t able to report live, as I had planned. I wasn’t the only one who noticed, either, as a quick look at the list of available Computer-to-Computer Airport networks confirmed.

So, instead I’ll have to try to sum up my thoughts during lunch here (which is looking extremely disappointing, by the way, assuming I’m not missing something!).

• I have to say, I find myself oddly unimpressed with Panther. I’m definitely not happy to see metal Finder windows. The new usability features will be nice, but they don’t strike me as earth-shattering. Overall, it doesn’t seem as significant an upgrade as Jaguar was.

  The one exception is definitely Exposé! It’s rare that I see a new UI feature that really screams “this will save me tons of time,” but I think Exposé qualifies!

  Oh—and was it just me, or did the Unix slide say that Panther would support popular Linux APIs? He actually said “UNIX APIs,” but that’s not what the slide said! If that’s true, it’s pretty cool—it could enable developers to easily port a whole class of apps that are built specifically for Linux rather than plain old UNIX. Guess we’ll have to see…

  I’m also really curious to find out more about what changes are in store for Cocoa. The “Cocoa Update” session should be interesting.

• The new development environment, Xcode, looks like it should answer at least a few of my previous gripes about Project Builder (the constant compilation, for example, reminds me a lot of Eclipse). It’s nice to see Apple putting the kind of polish that characterizes the iLife apps into its developer tools for a change!

• The iChat AV demo was masterfully done—what a wonderful presentation! The call to France and view of the Eiffel Tower was really fun, and really helped convey the possibilities inherent in video conferencing. I must confess my interest in the product might have been helped considerably by Apple’s decision to give everyone an iSight. How cool is that!

• Much of the G5 presentation was lost on me, as I’m not really a semiconductor geek, but it was really fun to nod my head knowingly as IBM’s Ph.D Senior VP talked about 13 angstrom transistors. It was also really exciting to see an absolute titan like IBM showing such solidarity with Apple. IBM is certain to be everything Motorola hasn’t been in the past few years, and should have the resources and motivation to ensure that Apple’s hardware never falls behind again!

  Not sure yet if I like the case, but I will have to reserve judgement until I’ve seen it in person.

Well, that’s it for now—I’m off to join the hoard of greedy geeks downstairs as they frantically try to secure their freebees (in addition to the iSight and Panther, O’Reilly is giving out free copies of Cocoa in a Nutshell, which makes me very glad I decided not to buy it the other day!).

More to follow…

As promised earlier, here are some photos from this morning’s keynote. Actually, they’re mostly of waiting for the keynote, but I’m sure you’ll find them fascinating nonetheless!