I got up just in time to get a shower and get back to the convention center. Actually, I felt pretty good this morning so I'm looking forward to this last day of the conference.

Session: Debugging Apps on Mac OS X

In this session both gdb on OS X was demonstrated and MetroNub from Metrowerks. A somewhat technical session. It's nice to know the tools are there. I then took some time to file my Thursday report in the internet cafe. None of the sessions for this period are particular critical or interesting to me so I just sort of pinball around and end up the Feedback forum on Apple Tools.

Lunch today was fun. I sat down at a table with a few Quark engineers and contributed the eternally simmering yet infinitely unsolvable arguments about the merits of C versus C++ (a taste's great/less filling debate). Anyway, it was fun. A couple of hardware guys sat down after that and I listened in on some CPU trivial. On my way out, I finally saw Maury Moskowitz and so sat down and asked him a couple of questions and had an otherwise enjoyable conversation. I learned that 3DKit is being brought to Cocoa so there will be another cool 3D technology for the Mac.

Session: Mac OS X Quartz

This session outlined the various components of Quartz: CoreGraphics and QuickDraw for 2D, QuickTime for multimedia, and OpenGL for 3D. These are OS X interfaces only so don't plan on using Quartz unless you have a Mac Os X only app. I stuck around for the Quartz display model (very similar to QuickDraw), the API overview and a quick demo.

Since we plan to rely on Carbon for awhile, this was largely optional info for me. I left early to get some specific help from DTS for our apps. I stopped by DTS Lounge to see Eric Simoni for COM questions. He wasn't there so I pinballed around to other sessions nearby.

Session: Aqua Feedback Forum

Most of the feedback I heard here (for what little time I was there) seemed very reasonable and well-thought out. We know that Aqua is not complete so this was an excellent opportunity for feedback.

I then went to see Eric Simemel in DTS. He was there and gave some pretty useful approaches to converting COM stuff to Mac as well as some potential pitfalls to watch out for.

When this was over, I stopped by the end of Printing session and asked a question about some features of Print Preview in OS X. While my question didn't have an answer, I know that I got it to the right people, so we'll see.

Session: Mac OS X: BSD Support

I only wanted to see the beginning of this out of general curiosity. I was pretty pleased with how much of BSD is in there so this will be a big win for Unix app compatibility.

Session: Mac OS X: MacApp Transition

I left the BSD session to go next door for the gory details on MacApp. I learned here that this will be fully supported for Carbon and going forward for OS X native apps. Much of what used to be in MacApp proper has been moved out to stand-alone class libraries (which can be used without MacApp) known as ACS frameworks. (I forget now what ACS stands for). The MacApp team's main charter is to "keep those developers happy," so even though they have meager resources, their future is not in doubt. Did you know that Apple System Profiler was written in MacApp_ Yep.

And there's more cool stuff planned for release 15. Release 14 is available now; it is an easy conversion from release 13 and is quite stable even in its present form.

Session: Carbon Low Level

This last session of the conference is probably the most densely packed with info of any I'd been to all week (and at 5:00 on Friday!). Anyway, this was worth the time even though this session could have been much longer. There was not any time left over for Q&A.

This ended the conference. Many people had already left; many were milling about. I was too tired to do any more than slowly leave the convention center, go back to my hotel room and take a long nap.

I'll do a summary of the conference tomorrow. Overall, though, this was not a spectacular conference but an extremely satisfying one.