Okay, this is the first day of WWDC. I had to finish off my notes from yesterday before leaving my hotel at about 9:00.

I got into the convention center around 9:30 and already the hall was filled with developers waiting to get into the Steve Jobs keynote in the "big hall." While waiting I spoke with Monica Meyer, Product Marketing Manager, for the newly merged Earthlink/MindSpring. Since I've been an Earthlink subscriber, she graciously requested and listened to some of my complaints about Earthlink. A few minutes later, I was talking with a developer from IBM who works on Visual Age for Smalltalk/Java, etc. (He was there on his own, not sponsored by his company). We discussed Smalltalk and Java until the doors finally opened about 10 minutes before 10:00

Naturally, there was the mad dash to get to the front of hall. I didn't participate, insteading choosing an aisle seat near the middle in the back. I had forgotten how huge the hall was. There, on stage were two 30' screens and a row of 7 Apple Studio Displays for demos.

Session: Steve Jobs Keynote.

I'm not going to rehash everything you'v e probably read elsewhere on the net about this event, just give some general comments.

Steve came on to warm applause and proceeded to talk about Apple's promise to increase market share and create a viable market in which to sell. The then showed some complelling numbers to prove they are doing that.

He reviewed iMac's 2 year history only to point out how this consumer device was driving growth for Apple implying that this enablesit to do other cool stuff.

QuickTime 5 (_) was announced for summer of this year with some data on QuickTime's popularity for showing movie trailers. The biggest feature for QuickTime 5 was MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding and decoding as well as streaming. WebObjects was then covered. This is one of the major foci of this conference (along with Mac OS X and Carbon). The biggest news here is that the price for this tool is now just $699 (from $55,000!).

Next Steve turned to Mac OS X. The release schedule will be as follows
DP3 Feb, 2000
DP4 May, 2000
Public Beta Summer, 2000
Ver 1.0 Final January, 2001

well a bit of a slip but it appears that the Public Beta will be 99% feature complete at its release. This is probably the best move since they must decide exactly how far back they'll port OS X to Apple hardware. That just takes time. They'll also, no doubt, get a lot of, er, feedback on Aqua so they'll want to review those issues.

DP4 is "developer complete." All the tools and APIs are in there. Some of the other highlights:
- Platinum size controls
- more Mac-like Finder (this was demoed and I was very happily impressed with what they've done)
- the save panel in OS X is really nice. I was blown away by that one.
- App Name in menus (instead of icon)
- more refined dock (this was demoed and, again, I was very happily impressed with what they've done; I was never a fan of the Next dock, Windows task bar, nor the DP3 dock. This is _way_cool_ .)
- fully Carbonized MSIE 5 on DP4
- OpenGL (as yet untuned but still fast)
- Java-2 (this is a huge announcement)
- new QuickTiime player (trays are now an option)
- all apps on the CD are Carbon apps, none Classic.

Then some demos of OS X by Steve. Then some featured app demos by Palm, Quake (thanks to Id and Omni Group), Adobe In Design, and Alias Wavefront Maya (this was a another huge announcement).

Okay, so some big announcements. Some further delivery on past promises, and DP4. I am happy with this (naysayers be damned). No, not the glitzied, most exciting of keynotes, but hey, they're getting there.

The one feeling I came away with after this keynote was that there will be very few reasons NOT to adopt OS X for users and developers alike. As I learn more about what's in theire, I'll review this impression.

After the keynote speech everybody rushed to get their OS X DP4 CD. As you would expect, lines were long at first but quickly settled down. With the CD came a little book "Inside Mac OS X: System Overview", 168 pages. In inside cover shows this as a Preliminary, May 2000 edition published by Fatbrain. When I get some more time, this looks like a quite nice overview of OS X.

Internet cafe was just opening, and so mobbed, so I decided to leave the convention center and go to the Apple Company Store before the next session at 1:30pm. This was a 10 minute drive directly up Interstate 680. The Apple complex can be easily seen from the De Anza Blvd exit as it is right next to the highway.

I picked up a couple of knick-knacks, a shirt, and, on a whim, an Airport card for my Pismo500 (more on this later). I installed the card in my car in the parking lot before leaving The Infinite Loop. Lo and behold, Airport was connnect to the Apple wireless network! Wow, wireless networking all about! Okay, with the hardware working, I headed back to San Jose for more fun.

I got back about 1:20pm but was hungry so I headed over to the cafeteria (another huge hall) to pick up some leftovers (anything). Fortunately, there was still plenty so I filled a place and sat down at a table with 3 or 4 people already eating. It turns out these were Apple people and I didn't get any of their names (darn). [Piece of advice: be nice to Apple people whenever you see them. They all looked very tired and are working extremely hard on getting OS X out the door. In other words, it is a good idea to resist your urge to jump on them for whatever is bothering you or you have a question about. Just common courtesy to fellow humans.]

When one woman saw the PST logo on my polo shirt, she asked about what we did since she had a degree in Psychology. Later, I spoke with a guy who's father had help design the MRI magnet for GE. At another point, while waiting for a session, I spoke with a guy who had worked for GE with MRI devices. Small world; who knew_

Session: Mac OS X Overview (sort of)

I got into the next session "Mac OS X overview" and they are demonstrating working apps and features of OS X (some of it is review from the morning session but with a little more detail). I must say, I am very impressed with the fit and finish of DP4. Even though it is not yet complete, I expect the Public Beta this summer to be nearly complete from the user's perspective and will quell a lot of the uproar generated by the "so-called" delay of version 1.0 until January. Geez, some people need to take a deep breath and relax.

I was too antsy to get my PowerBook set up for direct and wireless networking so I left this session and headed over to the Internet cafe to configure my machine. There are about 10 tables with 5 seates at each with power strips and ethernet RJ45 cables on them. Setting up was a snap. And, it turns out that Airport base stations are all over the convention center. It is terribly convenient to be sitting in one of the halls fetching e-mail while waiting for it to begin. The same is true for sitting outside in the grand concourse in a cushy sofa surfing the net or sending e-mail. Airport is definitely the way to go.

Okay, so now its time to talk about the three things one MUST bring to WWDC to make their life here great:
1) a PowerBook with Airport and an extra battery
2) a mobile phone (please turn off during sessions)
3) business cards. I am on a mission to trade them with anyone I talk to but am amazed how few people actually come with any. Bring plenty.

Having set up my PowerBook and sent my initial reports in, I went back to the "Mac OS X Overview" session to see more apps and feature demos. There's going to be a lot of cool apps available when OS X goes GM so even though this is not too exciting now, its going to be a big deal then.

Session: Carbon Overview

When this is over, I decide to stay in the main hall for the session "Carbon Overview" David Wright made a very compelling analogy that Mac OS X is a party and all the apps are invited, whether they are the classic apps, java apps, or Carbon apps. The main message which has already been repeated several times is now is the time to move to Carbon.

David went over the benefits of Carbon to users, to developers, and a general outline for who to do it:
1) Adopt Accessors (no more low-level global or raw data struct access)
2) Use the new toolbox UPPs
3) Adopt Navigation Services for a consistant behavior
4) use Apple Help
This is just to do the basic Carbon conversion. Once complete, you have a Carbon app and can then add the following new features of Carbon
Threads (layered on top of pthreads)
Carbon Events (no more polling)
Application Packaging
new Icons (they are beautiful)
Aqua (use Inteface Builder to create your interface; it imports old resources)

David is a very entertaining speaker and even though most of this is a repeat from last years' session, this year we had a lot more personal conversion stories, from the likes of PowerOn Software with their product suite, Quark with Express, and Macromedia with Freehand. Several of them likened the conversion to Carbon to be about equal to the conversion from 68k code to PPC code.

David ended with this challenge to developers:
a) go beta with your Carbon app when Apple does (and benefit from Apple's testing)
b) go GM with your Carbon app when Apple does.

Afterward, David hung around and answered questions. I was mollified with the various real-time services available in OS X: Unix "re-nicing" and a bunch of Core Foundation APIs. He also directed me to the OpenGL guys (specifically Geoff Stahl) regarding my concerns for VBL and video synching.

Again, I just stayed in the big hall for the next session, checked my e-mail and did a bit of surfing (becuase I could!) to learn of the outrage some felt on the net, especially at These people need to get back to work, I think.

Session: Aqua Overview

For this session Don Lindsay, Apple's head of the Human Interface Team spoke.

He looked and acted as one beleagured by the bleating and whining of millions for the DP3 Aqua interface (which was not a finished product). Nevertheless, he spoke with love and adoration of Aqua (understably so, it is beautiful).

What is Aqua_
- it is THE UI for OS X. There is no other.
- a set of:
appearances
behaviors
features
collection of apps

Design Objective:
- a rich, fun, rewarding UI built on the tradition of the Mac's ease of use -- simpler yet suitable for all users.
- And to provide a strong identity.

The newness of Aqua is a clear, clean, light, fresh and crisp UI full of subtleties. Translucency and color are only used when they add meaning (not gratuitous eye-candy). Translucency is used for things that "quickly come and go" like menus and dialogs. Color is used for selected widgets as well as controls in the title bar. Overall, there is a theme of "central-based alignment" versus the older left alignment in OS 9.

Behaviors are meant to provide more direct manipulation and provide more informative feedback.

UI features provide better focus on task, reduced modality, and better management of clutter.
- Window layering permits windows of different applications to be interleaved on activation. This means that all the windows from an inactive app will not come to the fore when one of its windows is clicked (a very subtle yet incredibly handy new feature).
- "sheets": dialogs attached to the window that generated them. cool.
- "drawers" reduced clutter and are meant for controls and lists that are accessed less frequently. a pretty cool feature.
- two new menu items: the application menu and an the windows menu. cool.
- lastly, "single window mode" to keep things very simple and reduce clutter. Only one window will ever be open at one time. This concept is very valuable but is still a "work in progress" and will be refined over the coming releases.

Some other new features:
- more consistent behavior for Carbon and Cocoa apps. The user should never know the difference.
- control respect platinum metrics (but no black lines nor grey backgrounds anywhere)
- enhanced finder (more Mac-like)
- refined Dock. this new dock is "way cool."
- new icon style to provide 128x128 icons which can scale with hinting down to 16x16 nicely. Can use old icons and then design new 128x128 ones. The new icons provide richer detail and more info via "emotion" on what the icon does. Also introduces "genres" as opposed to older "icon families." these icons were beautiful.

Overall, a very impressive showing. I think many will pleased with developments but should also understand that Aqua will evolve and is not completely finished.

Installing OS X

With the sessions for the day over, I decided to install OS X on my PowerBook. I had a bit of problem but once I cleared the OS X DP3 partition and started fresh, everything worked fine. I didn't get much chance to play with it, though.

While I was installing, Smith Software (_) gave an impromptu demo of a Mac video conferencing (H.323 compliant) software. Should be available before fall.

As I was finishing installation, somebody walked by with an ear phone radio being given away and told me to get one. So off I went to Developer Central in the Internet Cafe.

Developer Central

So I went into Developer Central to get my free radio and then ended up wandering around talking to vendors. I said hello go Greg Dow, creator of Metrowerks Powerplant, and did generally pestered anyone who was giving away free stuff.

Apple Masters.

I got to the show late but it was still worthwhile as we sang Happy Birthday to Herbie Hancock. Gregory Hines did a little tap dancing with comedy, and Brian Adams sang a couple of songs. Both Richard Dreyfus and Sinbad called in to both praise and harange the crowd (Richard Dreyfus did the praising, Sinbad did the haranging). Not a spectacular show but a good one. A nice end to a long day.

Finally, at 9:30 dinner (burger and Guiness) at the Waves Smokehouse and Saloon on Post Street (just 2 blocks north of the convention center). I was so exhausted I just went to bed at 10:30pm.

Hardware keynote tomorrow. Can't wait.