Last fall, we were in the crunch-time week for a client’s app before the iOS 5.0 submission deadline. I was profiling it in Instruments, trying to find where we could improve its launch-time performance, when I found a noticeable amount of time was spent in Address Book queries by a third-party video tracking library.

Not only was this behavior slowing down our launch, it was unexpected and–since it was a binary library without source code provided–we had no idea what it was doing with that information. A red flag was raised, and to my surprise the client even expressed willingness to cut the functionality until the questions could be answered.

As explained, the usage was almost clever: By adding a defined contact to your address book, you would unlock additional debug logging and reporting options for their SDK. They claimed that there were numerous applications already approved with this SDK, and I don’t feel the need to question their veracity. Most importantly, they offered a build without that functionality, provided it quickly, and that’s what shipped.

So it disappoints me that after my own personal experience of trying to keep code out of the Address Book, there are developers out there who apparently don’t think twice about slurping all of your contacts and sending them to their servers without your express permission.

This has happened before with Aurora Feint. It forever tainted my opinion of Open Feint, which came out of that. I had been under the impression that Apple was much more strict about this type of behavior–”chance of rejection” was one of the main reasons I brought attention to the library’s unexpected access. So I’m disappointed in Apple, too.

There have been calls for Apple to add required guards and notifications to the API’s access, similar to how Location Services is handled. That would probably be good, but at a certain point all the notifications just become “Grant Access?” alerts that users don’t think about. I think there’s a simpler way to do it, at least for a first attempt:

1. When submitting an app to iTunes Connect, ask “Do you access and transmit Address Book data?” similar to the existing question about using encryption.
2. Answering “yes” is a flag to the review team to verify that the developers have implemented their own reasonable opt-in mechanism, and maybe even a bit more scrutiny of their network traffic.
3. If an app is found to be violating this, terminate the developer’s account.

Yes, I feel that violating this expectation after making it clear that you are expected to be transparent about using this kind of information is worthy of booting you out of the App Store.

Thank you, Mr. Jobs. Thank you, Jobs family, for sharing him with us.

Digression: C4 is/was known for its excellent sit-down meals between sessions. At first, it seemed horribly inefficient to an engineer brain to get up after a session, move “all the way” to the banquet room next door, have to pick out a seat again, only to return to the session hall and have to find a new seat–why not just leave my stuff camped in the same seat all day?

But I quickly heeded Wolf’s advice-slash-admonition to find a different group of people to sit with at each change–and the world opened up. If you went to C4 just for the tech sessions, it was worth the cost but you only got the tip of the iceberg. I met well-knowns and unknowns and learned about their products, their consulting and business development experience, and got to know them without pressure. I may not even remember their names right now (I’m terrible with names) but every one of those conversations built community.

I’m not going to claim WWDC lunches will ever approach C4′s, but you can incorporate a bit of the C4 experience into WWDC: Instead of getting together with the same group for lunch every day, take at least two lunches in the cafeteria area. Find a seat at a table with other people you don’t know, and strike up a conversation to find out who they are, what they do, where they’re from. I somewhat unintentionally did this last year, and I promise you: It will open your eyes.

If you’re stuck for icebreakers, here are some old reliables:

• “What did you think of the Keynote/’State of’ addresses?”
• “Did you catch yesterday’s Brown Bag session?”
• “What sessions are you looking forward to?” (earlier in the week)
• “What was the best session you attended?” (I love this one later in the week)

Asking where someone’s from or how many WWDCs they’ve attended tend to be short answers that don’t lead to conversations. Asking about shipping software can be great–people love talking about their products–but make the interest genuine so it doesn’t feel like an interview or “I’m only asking about yours so I can tell you about mine.”

Bring your business cards. After or during an interesting discussion, ask for one of theirs and offer one of yours. Periodically review the cards you’ve received during the week to refresh your memory of names and topics–you’ll be surprised how often you’ll run into those same people later.

Keep your own badge visible as much as possible to make it easy to approach you and ask about your company or just say “your name sounds familiar, did you…?”

For more advice on networking, check out Brent Simmon’s “Advice to new developers on networking”.

For more tips on WWDC, Jeff LaMarche’s “First Time Guide” contains nothing but tips I completely agree with. (Except my serious personal aversion to sleeping in public, including on planes.) Wait, I have one extra note: Plan to stow your gear before attending the Thursday Bash. I had my laptop backpack one year, and was miserable.

Last year was the first I’d managed to go to C4. I was glad I was attuned enough to the community to get into the short registration window; I was overloaded and overwhelmed by the conference itself and the people I met; I was desperately hoping to go again this year.

I guess I’m one of the silent apologists in regards to Section 3.3.1. I understand Apple not wanting to support backward compatibility going forward for a third-party dev environment, but I think it’s foolish of them to have called out something virtually unenforceable, and any claim of “crap apps” inherently generated from a Flash source only makes the current existence of crap apps on the App Store that much more ugly.

The speakers he brought in, the way he reacted to disrespect of a speaker, the statements he’s made in public and in person–Wolf’s decision seems perfectly self-consistent. He obviously feels Apple’s decision here affects him and the community more than I do. Even though our opinions differ, I respect his opinions and admire the strengths of his convictions.

Those same opinions and convictions gave C4 a unique character. In a time when there is a surfeit of excellent conferences to choose from, C4′s absence will leave a void.

I encourage all those who feel as strongly about Section 3.3.1 as Wolf does to start (or continue) to speak out about it. I may not be with you, but I’m not against you.

[super dealloc];

If for some reason you know who I am but we haven’t actually met yet, introduce yourself and let me buy you a drink. You should be able to stalk me best that weekend by following my personal Twitter account.

After cleaning out large copyrighted material (part of a Justin Timberlake song on the title screen and a Star Wars snippet on the XQuery screen) and removing many of the Keynote build animations I like to use but which translate poorly to static images, I have made the presentation available. I didn’t record the audio, so the text may seem more terse than it really was.

• HTML export with most of the animations still intact
• Zipped archive containing:
  • Keynote 09 file
  • PDF export
  • XMLDemo source serving as the examples I showed

Even behind the booth, I got to meet a lot of interesting people. There were plenty of independent developers even then, and many of them had whimsical titles on their business cards; I seem to recall a “Grand Poobah,” but the one title that made the biggest impression on me was “Software Illusionist.”

I remarked on the title and the gentlemen replied to the effect of, “really, that’s all it is I do–present an illusion that people find useful.” That simple statement (probably mutated somewhat through the years in my memory) was revelatory for me.

It may seem trite to say “it’s all ones and zeroes” but at some level that is all we do as developers: Find ways to organize and present data patterns to users in a manner which doesn’t require a Beautiful Mind to interpret, or make it look like a ball bouncing around an artificial rectangular constraint on screen, or make it sound like music, or convert physical stimuli to a data pattern to present later. When the user buys into the illusion and doesn’t have to hear the creaking of the mechanism, the Software Illusionist has succeeded.

To that Software Illusionist, whoever you were (or hopefully still are): Because of you, to this day I am still compelled to make my software feel like magic. Sometimes it feels like a curse, but I still consider it a blessing.

Thank you.

That’s just software created by attendees. It’s an impressive Who’s Who of companies and applications, all sitting down together in a conference room for the weekend.