I haven’t been waiting around to have the last word on WWDC; I’ve been busy and distracted, but I suppose it’s time to sum up my experiences.

This was my first time attending WWDC. I’ve wanted to for a long, long time but could never justify the expense for something that was effectively a software hobby. But with a newly solidified application idea, and a perfect storm of situations, I couldn’t resist on the year that turned out to be the biggest WWDC yet.

Perfect Storm, Part One: My sister-in-law and her husband live in San Francisco, they were going to be in town that week, and they were perfectly happy to have me stay with them during the week. That cut out the great big expense of lodging. Pacific Heights is not as convenient as the local-to-Moscone hotels, but it was really only an inconvenience when I needed to carry my bag during the Bash Thursday night instead of dropping it off in a hotel room. Staying with them will probably become a tradition as long as they will have me.

Perfect Storm, Part Two: Alaska Airlines offered a great flight price ($170 round trip). Even though it required departing Seattle early Sunday morning and returning Saturday night, that actually worked out perfectly due to Part One: I got the opportunity to have family brunch Sunday, and had time to take them out to dinner Friday night to thank them for their hospitality. (I can now highly recommend Argentine steak house El Raigon, and their wonderful selection of Malbecs.) I also had the opportunity to catch all of Friday’s sessions instead of having to cut out early to make it to the airport.

Perfect Storm, Part Three was a huge factor, but the briefest to describe: I was generously given permission by my boss to go into vacation time debt. Without that, I don’t think I could have justified the trip.

These factors all started lining up in the last days before early registration ended. I booked my held flight reservation from my iPhone late Thursday night, after an Xcoders meeting; I purchased my WWDC ticket and ADC Select membership (another first) on the last day of early registration. I certainly felt like I just made it under the wire when they announced the conference was sold out.

The Keynote

Since this was my first WWDC, I figured I had to bathe in the Reality Distortion Field and see the Keynote. I overslept and woke up at 4:30 instead of my planned 3:30, figured out which bus was running at that hour only to miss it by less than a block, and ended up walking the entire way. I was in line just before 6:00, about halfway down Minna (before the first “everyone get to know your neighbor better” compression of the line).

Keynote Line Swag Tip: If you’re interested in swag (t-shirts, MacTech magazines and more) while in line, staying to the street side of the packed-in line will increase your chances of not being ignored.

Stand in line, eventually get let into Moscone. I had already registered on Sunday, so I followed the majority of the crowd up to the second floor “holding pen” (my term; I never actually heard the staff call it that) where we were told that we were guaranteed to get into the main auditorium. Comfortable in the knowledge I didn’t need to hold my spot, I made a quick restroom break.

Keynote Line Coffee Tip: The Starbucks right near Moscone is insanely packed at this time. Luckily my walk had earlier taken me past an uncrowded Starbucks on O’Farrell, but also try the Peet’s at 2nd and Mission.

I stopped paying attention to time; no easier way to get frustrated than watching a clock while waiting. After some period of time, we were led up to the third floor and another “holding pen” area in the hallway. After another period of time, we were let into Presidio, the largest available conference hall, where I quickly realized that unless I wanted to fight my way into the first ten rows it would look the same from any other row in the hall. So I casually settled into a seat about four rows behind the left side projection screen and awaited my first in-the-flesh Keynote.

If you have read this far, I apologize for the cliffhanger but this post has already become longer than expected. I will follow up on the rest of the week soon.

Comments(1)

I’m certainly not planning to keep people updated on every CSS selector change on the site (there will be a lot), but I have to mark the occasion of changing from the boring stock WordPress “Kubrick” theme to the first revision of Corporation Unknown’s graphic identity.

Most significant is the new logo done by our friends at SkyCubeMedia. Thanks to Sky (and my wife’s initial sketch), I now have a site identity I can carry around (in the form of business cards) to WWDC.

Comments(0)

When you’ve been involved in (or just been watching) an industry long enough, you begin to see cycles. Or maybe they’re just ideas which were ahead of their time and eventually have come to fruition. (You can stop your smirking right now, Smalltalk advocates.)

Since changing from CVS to Subversion, one of these possible cycles has been tickling my basal ganglia: The change from CVS’ “every file on its own revision schedule” to Subversion’s “one revision for the entire repository state” has been both a blessing and a confusion, but it also reminded me of a revision control system from the pages of MacTech magazine. A few days ago, I finally remembered a keyword (“orthogonal”) at the same moment I had some time to do a bit searching, and I found it: VOODOO. From the stale MacUpdate entry:

VOODOO Personal (Versions Of Outdated Documents Organized Orthogonally) is a stand-alone version control tool, with a neat graphical user interface. It offers simple and clear access for managing projects in which files evolve in numerous versions. The tool manages not only variants and revisions of single files, but of whole software projects (multiple files, multiple users, multiple variants, access rights, project structure, project history, etc.).

VOODOO differs from previous source code control systems in its orthogonal approach to version management. This means that for every component of a project hierarchy, you can not only store its revision history, but also different variants of the same component. The orthogonal organization of revisions and variants leads to a much clearer arrangement than in other tools which use trees for organizing variants and revisions.

VOODOO uses delta storage for storing different versions, which can yield savings of about 95% (up to 99%). It is not restricted to text files but also handles files of arbitrary type (desktop publishing documents, databases, libraries, applications, etc.)

I remember downloading a trial of VOODOO Personal and not grokking it, but I hadn’t even started using CVS at the time; was Subversion simply a descendent? Reading the afore-linked ATPM review and the Google Book Search text of Software Configuration Management, I’d have to conclude “no.” The terminology still seems generically confusing, and the perceived level of fiddlyness is still something of a barrier, even though many of the concepts (variants and freedom of file layout) are appealing.

It seems uni software plus no longer maintains VOODOO–not surprising given all the screenshots you’ll find online are chock full of Platinum window goodness–but I wonder if its absence isn’t just due to it riding a wormhole into the future.

Comments(0)