Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

I have to admit, I was always a little nervous about how the WWDC Weblogger Dinner would come together (never having planned such an “event” before), but I’m proud to report that not only did last night’s festivities go off without a hitch, they were actually successful beyond my expectations. I’m not exactly sure how many people ended up attending, but it was certainly over 30, and I think we had a great mix of truly interesting people (both Apple and indie developers) having conversations that ranged from Safari’s RSS integration to medieval Welsh!

For me, the most interesting thing about the dinner was actually meeting so many people I’d previously known only through web pages. It was as if my NetNewsWire subscription list had suddenly sprung to life, and it was fascinating to see how peoples’ actual appearances and personalities differed from my impressions. Michael McCracken, for example, was a lot younger than I expected, while Wolf Rentzsch was more friendly and outgoing.

My only real regret is that our space didn’t accomodate mingling very well. I tried my best to make it to every table and have a meaningful conversation with everyone, but I still ended up feeling that I hadn’t really talked to people as much as I would have liked. I think this is one respect in which the Thirsty Bear would have been a far better venue (the other respect would definitely have been food). Now that I’m a little more experienced, I will plan ahead for next year’s dinner and beat O’Reilly and the rest of the WWDC party scene to the punch on reservations.

I want to sincerely thank everyone who attended. I think it’s a testament to the awesome social networking power of weblogs that someone like me can have so many interesting acquaintances, and I appreciate you letting me hang out with you. All of this, of course, makes me sad that I can’t attend ADHOC, but, hey, there’s always next year…

In the meantime, here are a few photos documenting the occasion (apologies if I missed you—I rejected a lot of my shots as unflattering due to eating or what have you).

(Update: It has come to my attention that some people felt excluded. My apologies, although I’m not sure what I should have done to promote the dinner more effectively—demand that more widely read webloggers mention it? I guess I assumed that Brent’s post on the subject would have been seen by most of the Mac developer/weblogger community.)

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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…

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Anyone interested in attending the weblogger meetup I’m organizing for WWDC should take note of the event’s new web page. It currently contains a list of people who’ve expressed interest in attending (with URLs), a map to the restaurant, and links to possible related activities.

Some additional administrivia:

• It looks like the consensus is more or less for having the event at The Thirsty Bear. The only problem is that, at this point, we’ve got kind of an awkward number of people: potentially 15+. This seems like too many for “normal” seating, but unfortunately banquets get rather expensive. I guess I’ll have to call to see what our options are.

• As the web page suggests, we still need to set a date and time. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t announced much about the schedule for WWDC 2004, so it’s hard to know if we would be conflicting with something. If we go by last year’s schedule, though, the biggest lulls seem to be on Wednesday and Friday (Monday had an ADC reception, Tuesday had the Apple Design Awards, Thursday had the Campus Bash). On the other hand, I do agree with the people who suggested it might be better to meet up earlier in the week, so people know each other during the rest of the conference, so maybe it would be better to try for Monday, Tuesday, or even the Sunday evening everyone will likely be arriving?

  I’m definitely open to suggestions on this, so let me know what would work best for everyone.

• Though we have more or less decided against the Giants/A’s game as our venue for a variety of reasons, that certainly doesn’t mean people can’t get together and go. If you’re interested in attending, Justin Williams is organizing a trip, so be sure to let him know.

• Michael McCracken has some other suggestions for other interesting activities people might want to participate in at WWDC.

The response to my proposal for a WWDC weblogger meetup has been good: so far we have ten intrepid souls in. The actual activities remains a bit uncertain at this point, but Michael McCracken made an interesting suggestion I hadn’t thought of: we could attend the San Francisco vs. Oakland game at SBC Park on July 2 (which, as it turns out, is fireworks night at the park).

This idea brings up an important question, though: how long does everyone plan to stick around? I agree that July 2 would be a good date since it wouldn’t conflict with any of Apple’s offical events, but I know a lot of people don’t plan to stay that long.

The idea of leaving the immediate vicinity of the Moscone Center (whether for a ball game, barbecue, or whatever) also introduces some transportation issues, but I agree with Michael that either we locals or public transportation could probably solve our problem there.

So, then, what does everyone think? Dinner and baseball? Just dinner? Just baseball? Or should we pursue the picnic/barbecue format (perhaps somewhere like Baker Beach, with its excellent Golden Gate Bridge vantage and picnic facilities)?

(Update: I just discussed this with one prospective attendee who made some excellent points about the merits of keeping this informal, flexible and close to Moscone. As this person pointed out, peoples’ schedules can change a lot over time, and it would probably be best, in terms of ensuring that everyone who wants to can particpate, to make sure this event is one where people can easily come and go as they want or need to.

This being the case, I have to say that the Thirsty Bear, an excellent restaurant right next to Moscone, is once again sounding like a solid choice.)

Justin Williams’s post on getting a student scholarship to WWDC 2004 (congrats, BTW, Justin!) reminded me of something I’ve been meaning to write about here: namely, the need for an informal, unofficial weblogger get together at WWDC.

You see, while I found last year’s conference informative almost to the point of information overload, one of the best parts for me was actually getting out and meeting my peers. Since then, I’ve always thought that WWDC would be at least an order of magnitude cooler if it could combine the level of informal evening socializing found at places like South by Southwest Interactive with—wait for it—actual, meaningful information exchange during the day (read this comic if you’re not sure what I’m talking about here, BTW)!

Perhaps these are just the mad rantings of a fevered brain, but I’d like to at least give it a try. My initial conception of such an event seems to involve a barbecue for some reason, but San Francisco is one of America’s great cities, and there is certainly no shortage of other possibilities. A sojourn at the fantastic Thirsty Bear (which is very close to the Moscone Center, produces excellent beer, and does not have a lackluster item on its menu) might be another idea. I suppose it might depend to a large extent on the size of the group involved…

So, then, Mac developer-webloggers: what do you think? Any interest? Ideas? If no one responds, no big deal—I’ll just call this an April Fools joke and go back to trying to think of something interesting to weblog about :-).