Dan Wood: The Eponymous Weblog

I'm still excavating myself from last week's amazing WWDC, not to mention the frantic work in the previous work to get Sandvox announced. As a bit of catharsis and debriefing, I though I would do a little summary of the week's activities.

On Monday, Terrence and I, exhausted already from a week's intense work, were ready to post the announcement for Sandvox on the Karelia website some time Monday afternoon or evening. We had been preparing a preview for WWDC week so that we could talk freely about the application that week. Plus, a little public interest in the program will motivate us to get the application out the door! We were almost ready to go live; we were waiting for a couple of designs that were (ahem) a bit late arriving from the designers.

After the jaw-dropping ("The rumors were actually true?") keynote speech, we went to the MacSB gathering outdoors at the park, where I got to meet (or re-meet) many familiar names. (We all had a good chat, but we suspected that, since nobody in our gathering had found anybody at the designated meeting place, there might have been another set of MacSB people meeting elsewhere, perhaps somewhere else in the park.) Since I was sitting next to Rainer Brockerhoff, creator of the RBSplitView component we're using in Sandvox, we decided to take the wraps off the application and give a little demo to him and whomever was interested. A modest debut. Jonathan Wight was probably the first to blog about it.

After a few general sessions in the afternoon, we finally got the last-minute designs uploaded to our site, and took it live. At Buzz's amazing Weblogger Dinner, I got to hang out with a bunch of cool geeks (is that an oxymoron? Not anymore!) and show Sandvox to whomever was interested. Duncan took some good pictures there, including some of me, one alongside Eric Case of Google, who looks like he could be my brother!

On Tuesday, I figured it would be a good idea to install XCode 2.1 and see if we could get Sandvox to build under Intel. I had no idea what I was in for. Most other developers told me that they got their app building and running on Intel almost immediately; I, on the other hand, couldn't even get our program to build and run on PowerPC! It's not like there was anything weird about our application! I had no idea that I would spend many hours in the lab that week trying to figure things out. (Interminable story short: Even though XCode says ZeroLink is off, it might still be on if you have Fix & Continue checked. And I had been using a GCC debugging directive "-freplace-objc-classes" which is apparently no longer supported, and, in fact, silently causes big framework runtime problems if you are building in XCode 2.1) Anyhow, thanks much to the seven or eight apple engineers that tried to help me on those issues! It was finally solved Late Friday afternoon, with only ten minutes left in the lab time to try to build Sandvox for Intel. Alas, we rely on a couple of third-party frameworks which haven't been updated yet. So we will have to try again later.

The sessions during the week were for the most part useful, though I can't tell you anything about them because the whole week, save the Jobs keynote, is under NDA. In fact, maybe I should stop now. Well, I'll write in generalities. Even more valuable were the labs that were set up throughout the week. In addition to the help I got with XCode 2.1, I was able to get some good advice from the graphics and imaging team (in fact, some good ideas directly from one of the "Meet the Engineers" gentlemen). Even more amazingly helpful were several members of the WebKit team, some famous and some not, who have just graciously open-sourced the framework. Thanks guys! Terrence, meanwhile, bugged the engineers about hard Bindings and Core Data issues.

The Apple Design Awards were moved from Tuesday to Wednesday; I'm guessing this was done entirely for wardrobe reasons. I was not at all surprised to see Delicious Library win, but nevertheless pleased, since I have been following the career of Mike Matas since he approached me in early 2002 offering to design icons for Watson. I was also happy that Comic Life picked one up, since I've been in touch with Robert Grant, its developer, over the last few years, and traded advice about Core Image with him.

I did leave a bit perplexed about the winners for the "Tiger Technology" awards. Transmit is great and I'm sure iSale is too, but with all the great technologies that Tiger has to offer, like Core Image, Spotlight, and Core Data, they seemed to be a bit of a stretch.

Overall, the week went well. We learned a lot, and got some good ideas for tightening up our app as we move it from Alpha to Beta. It felt nice to be "back" at the Mac platform after a hiatus of a couple of years. (My last WWDC was in 2002 when the Sherlock hit the fan. ) Obviously there is a feeling of "once bitten, twice shy" and I know we are in Apple's sights now. But I'd rather be writing Cocoa software than using any other platform.