For my second consecutive year, I have been sent to Apple's WWDC by my present employer Psychology Software Tools, Inc. <. Last year was my first year ever at WWDC. That year was a real gas but I expect that this year will be even more exciting.

My computering background:
Well, you can visit my web site to find out what I'm about. A link to an outdated resume is there. But I have been programmings Macs since 1991.

Our company background:
We service the cognitive and behavioral psychology research and education field. That is, our products are used in higher education to teach scientific method and then used by researchers to conduct their experiments.

We originally developed a MS-DOS based experiment generator, called MEL which later became MEL Pro. We are currently working on a Windows and Mac based experiment generator which features a drap and drop type of operation. (see products, below). This tool is used primarly by cognitive and behavioral researchers for a wide variety of stimulus/response type experiments. Some of these require very critical timing precision; since this is sometimes impossible in a preemptive multi-tasking environment, we also provide timing auditing services to show when and by how much timing actually differed from real time.

Our founder, Dr. Walter Schneider, is also very interested in the human brain mapping project where a functional map of the brain is being worked out. This is now possible with MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) devices. We have achieved the impossible objective of putting both an LCD stimulus device and a special 5-button response device in a a 3 Tesla magnetic field without causing interference. This allows researchers to present visual and auditory stimuli to a subject and actually "watch" the brain process the information.

Our product:
With this version of our product, E-Prime, instead of a monolithic application, we took the approach of a set of separate but integrated applications. The product consists of four parts:
E-Studio: graphical experiment editor and experiment script generator. (very MS Visual Basic-like). Generates e-Basic, which is very similar to BasicScript.
E-Run: native runtime engine with runs generated e-Basic script and saves resultts to a data file.
E-Merge: merges the results from several experiment trials into one file for statistical analysis.
E-DataAid: provides some "quick view" statistical information and allows the filtering and selection of data elements to be passed on to either an advanced statistical package (SPSS, SAS, Minitab, etc.) or to an MS-Excel spreadsheet.

We are currently in beta with all of the Windows version. The Mac versions of E-Run, E-Merge, and E-DataAid beta will commence upon final release of the Windows product. A native E-Studio for Mac is still uncertain and depends largely upon the tools and facilities Apple provides in OS X (there will be no pre-OS X version of this application unless we decide to re-implement it in Java).

My specific objectives for this conference
1) future of GameSprockets for OS X. In Carbon, GameSprockets is our convenient access to VBL, page flipping, as well as input devices.
2) migration path from Classic->Carbon->Cocoa and how far it makes sense to go on this path for various development/conversion projects. E-Run may stay in Carbon, but E-Studio may make more sense to be native Cocoa or Java.
3) future of Windows emulation on OS X. How soon must we make the port for our Mac users_ How long can they work with E-Studio in a VPC environment and how seamlessly can we integrate the different environments.
4) real-time facilities of OS X, especially w.r.t. vertical refresh (VBL) We need to guarantee timing precision for stimulus onset and response activation as well as continue to provide time auditing services.
5) Java as a cross platform development environment with OS X Should all but E-Run be ported to Java or Carbon or Cocoa_
6) COM, Java Bean -like facilities in OS X. Essentially, what is the component architectore or component facilities of OS X_
7) new development tools. (future of MacApp, future of MPW, new stuff, etc.)

At lot to ask_ Well, I don't know but I'll be reporting on this in the days to come.

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I flew in last night just to get settled in my hotel and be ready for the week.

On Sunday, I arrived at the convention center around noon, since I registered too late for the conference to get into any of the Sunday sessions.

I highly recommend this practice of getting in at least by Sunday and registering this day because tomorrow registration will be a zoo. In fact, activities do not start until 10:00 am Monday to account for the frenzy.

Upon registering, I was presented with 1) a show entrance badge (it is very important not to lose this.) In practice, everyone just wears them around their necks.
2) a Conference Agenda (which fits nealty into the back of the badge
3) one long sleeve black mock turtle nect with the Apple logo and "WWDC" printed in white in upper left. (standared WWDC fare).
4) additionaly, one short-sleeve white T-shirt with a large Aqua "X" on the front and the phrase "Coming to a Macintosh near you" with a small Apple logo with "Think Different" under it. This forebodes the emphasis of this conference on OS X.- and a rather nifty knapsak/backback combo with the Apple logo and "WWDC 2000" on it. This is a very handy pack made to nicely hold one or two PowerBooks with enough room for other stuff.

Inside the pack were
a) Conference Guide describing all the details of the conference
b) 2 WebObjects CDS: "WebObjects 4.5 Movies" and "WebObjects 4.5 Evaluation" (foreboding emphasis upon WebObjects).
c) an Apple logoed orange translucent pen with brushed aluminum tip (same as last year)
d) a 5" x 6" WWDC notebook with about 200 blank pages (I liked last year's better)
e) a coupon for a door prize, and finally,
f) a coupon for a special prize (to be announced)

I spent a bit of time looking at all this stuff and then decided I needed some food. This, I know will happen throughout the week -- getting so involved in what's being handed to you that you forget basic needs, and is part of the reason Apple provides plenty of snacks and drinks during the conference.

So, as I was walking to Original Joe's Restaurant, I happened to be following two guys wearing cool Omni Group T-shirts and another guy wearing the same "X" t-shirt as I (which is described above). I followed them into Original Joe's and since there was a twenty-minute wait, we all kind of left together. At that point, I asked if I could join them for lunch and they agreed. So we wandered about a bit and then settled on a Chinese restaurant. It turns out that I had lunch with Andrew Stone (of Apple Darwin fame) and Ken Case, Director of Engineering, and Andrew Abernathy, Senior Engineer, of the Omni Group. These guys have an OS X web browser, OmniWeb, and Ken did the Quake 3 port to OS X for the fun of it (he got the basics up and running in about a weekend) .

Cool.

I got a couple of my questions answered about
1) COM on OS X (not needed). Objective-C in Cocoa with its late dynamic binding and runtime message call resolution precludes much of what COM provides. COM does have a binary structured data representation which we rely upon in another part of our application suite that will be hard to replace. Any suggestions_
2) GameSprockets in Cocoa (not needed). GameSprockets will be needed for Carbon development but most of low-level API's are already in Cocoa thereby making it seemingly redundant. We'll follow up with any game-specific announcements as we learn them.

Throughout lunch, there was quite a bit of geek banter about recent OS X builds which these guys had seen and worked with but was a bit foreign to me. We speculated on the big announcement for the conference. This was an incredibly enjoyable lunch. My thanks to Andrew, Ken and Andrew. Hope to do it again.

This is the kind of serendipitus event that one must be open to, even seek out at this kind of event. Just walk up to people (especially wearing Apple related logo'd stuff) and start talking.

After lunch and after parting with these guys, I went back to the convention center to just "hang out" and happened to meet the Connectix Virtual PC product manager (I don't remember his name--my apologies), but I gave him my card and hope to hear from him after the conference.

Business cards are a very useful tool at this event (unless your name is, say, Andrew Stone, or George Warner, or somebody really famous to Apple geeks).

Well, I had some other things to do for Sunday so I split. On the way out, I introduced myself to a couple of first-timers who I hope to see again but then again, maybe not. Time will tell.

I can't wait for tomorrow's events.