The started early with the objective of getting my Monday post in. Whew! Another day, more chaso. I expect that events will get more chaotic as the week progresses so I don't know if I'll be abble to keep a coherent organization or reasonable writing style. I'll try.

I got to the convention center a bit late, about 9:15. The big hall was full so we were diverted to one of the smaller halls for a video feed of the morning's keynotes.

Session: Keynote Mitch Mandich ("The Marketing messsage")

(mostly marketing stuff which I don't pay too much attention to.) Apple Demo Days will double in number. A lot of titles coming back to the Mac. Exciting new titles, like Maya, coming to the Mac. More complete solutions are now available in the channel. Many more vertical market solutions with a very strong market focus. Evidence of this can be found on Apples "Made for Mac" web site. Closing theme: "We're working to help you succeed."

Session: Keynote J. Rubinstein and P. Schiller (Product overview/review)

Some key points
- Apple is seeking out new customers
- Apple is #1 in eduction (w/mkt share going up)
- Apple is #1 in creative by a very wide margin ( 4 or 5 Macs to the "other platform")
- For home users, Apple market share doubles.
- 4 million Macs shipped last year.
- Macs showing up everywhere in media
examples:
- Time magazine
- Felicity TV show (a clip was shown regarding a tender momemt over a Mac)

Product by product reviews...
- all four quadrants of product matrix available and some reved several times.
- 17 of the 18 promises from last year (all except audio) have been fulfilled. Audio facilities will be demo'd tomorrow.
- G4s: 1 Million shipped
- Mac OS X sings on a G4, with a cool Multiprocessing and multi-threading demo (no product announcement, but a tech show. So we know its coming.)
- Power management across board (even for desktops connected to USP)
- USB a great success on Macs (6 million Macs shipped with it) Thanks from Apple to developers. 500 USB devices announced / 400 shipping / 150 work on a Mac right out of the box (no driver update). For others, please use the web driver update facility to make USB very easy for users.
- Firewire (3 million Macs shipped with it). More new devices for it and 800 Mbs coming with net download device drivers.
- Airport (2.5 Airport enabled Macs shipped). There was a Base Station review. This is one cool puppy. It has a CPU, 1 ethernet port, 1 modem port, is a NAT router, and a DCHP server. Now I want one. They demo'd the classroom on wheels with Airport. Really cool for space constrained schools. Streaming video was shown over Airport.

Lastly and industrial design review. No product announcements here but Apple continues to do better, cool stuff.

Afterward an Apple K-12 rep who sat behind me introduced himself to me because his wife is a psychologist and he was doing some basic reconaissance for her (she's in clinical and we focus on research and education).

Until the next session, I'm going to "pinball," which is to say, bounce around talking to people, seeing what's going on, and catching the general mood or anything else I can.

Went to Metrowerks booth to get Carbon beta CD and met MWRon. These are a good bunch of guys. No wonder they make great tools.

Spoke to Geofff Perlman and Lorin Rivers of RealSoftware. Last year, RealBasic, their product, won the Apple Design Awards. It has only gotten better since.

Spoke with Spec Bowers of AppMaker (got CD). Lots of new stuff in AppMaker since I last used it (1995).

Finished and filed my Monday report and went back into the Developer Central Hall before lunch and afternoon sessions.

Met Joe Strout of MeshWorks and Quesa fame who is working at RealSoftware now. Joe has done a lot with 3D tools (Meshworks) and on an open-source version of Apple's defunct QuickDraw 3D (Quesa).

Talked with James Less of Tropical Software regarding COM stuff for Mac OS. This was a valuable contact and will talk again with these guys in the near future. They had a cool CD.

[Note to self: Mocha with caramel is way too much sugar and caffeine in one serving. Expresso alone is enough.] They have tables of drinks, snacks and expresso booths everywhere, so it is really easy to get a bit too much caffeine.

Stopped by the "OS X Install" booth and found out that DP4 supports multiple monitors (for most cards) ... yeah! Another guy in line had exactly the same question so I think a lot of people have this concern. Now I can "live" in DP4 all day since I have a dual monitor G3 desktop system at work.

Had lunch and spoke with a very affable German fellow from "Milestone Software" (missed the German name). They do wide area wireless stuff. Lunch today was delicious; lunches so far seem to be much better than last year. An Apple guy was there but he was obviously busy with scheduling something giving clear signs that he was not available for small talk, or any talk for that matter.

[pondering out loud: Is Maury Moskowitz (sic) at WWDC_ He's always good for stirring things up and I have a few questions for him.]

Session: Games and Mac OS X

The main theme of this sessions is that while GameSprockets was some kind of add-on (or a kind of wart) to the real OS, the facilities that GameSprockets provided in OS 9 will just be built into Mac OS X and available to everyone, not just for gamers.

For graphics, there will be OpenGL for both 3D and 2D, for both OS 9 and OS X. Quartz will be there for OS X and most of QuickDraw will be in there but with some modifications (use accessors, different GDevice and buffer handling).

Therefore, GameSprockets in OS X will be a much smaller set of specific APIs for games.
- DrawSprockets will be in there but a little bit limited. CoreGraphics will be in OS X.
- InputSprocket will become the HID Manager in OS X and sit fairly low on top of IOKit and will fix many of the sins of Inputsprocket.
- SoundSprocket will become something as yet undetermined but MIDI is going to be a big thing on OS X so CoreAudio services will be there.
- NetSprocket and OpenPlay will continue but neither are optimal solutions. Expect either something new or for these to morph somehow.

OpenGL 1.1 is currently in DB4 and OpenGL 1.2 is coming Real Soon Now (tm) with no announced date.

Session: Feedback Forum Games

A lot of question in this session and some feedback (which is what these things are for). Everything you say is recorded and evaluated later.

I got some questions asked about VBL synching for multiple monitors and helped the panel understand what ways psychologists need this.

I also asked about the migration path for OS 9 and OS X apps and how to accomplish thise. While I did not get a definite answer here, I do believe guidelines for this will be provided. At this time, this path is not clear nor apparently straightforward but I will defer until Public Beta of OS X before revisiting this issue with "passion."

Brain Greenstone, author of Nanosaur and Bugdom had a bunch of questions on OpenGL features and sound. And Bud (_) from Westlake (sorry for not remembering your name) also had a number of InputSprocket concerns.

One thing I certainly hope they are thinking about is for developers to deliver one binary of their game-oriented games to run on both OS 9 and OS X (remember fat binaries_).

Feedback sessions are important because it is one of the best ways to voice your concerns in a way you know will get noticed.

Afterward I spoke at length with Jeff Moore regarding sound latency issues on Mac OS 9 and how they're going away on Mac OS X. Also, Geoff Stahl is always very helpful in DTS especially regarding OpenGL and DisplaySprocket.

More "pinballing" around. Since I missed the session "Carbon Event Model Basics" and then the "Carbon Event Model Advanced" I decided to go to the remainder of the "3rd Party Tools" where Metrowerks and RealSoftware showed their stuff for OS X. When I got there, there were just getting into the Q&A portion. I didn't have any, so I went to the remainder of the "Carbon Event Model Advanced" and they too were in the Q&A portion of the session.

So I sat down to fetch mail and do a bit of surfing. After a bit, I looked up and saw Geoff Stahl talking to a former Apple DTS and graphics engineer, Tim Carroll. I greeted him and found out that he is now working at Connectix on Virtual PC. If you have a G4 and if you upgrade to 3.03, you will find a 50% improvement in graphics speed in VPC, thanks largely to Tim Carroll. This means that if you must use VPC for games, you will probably find its graphics performance quite improved on your G4. Connectix is fortunate to have Tim on their team.

I left Tim and Geoff to continue their talking to get dinner before the evening's activities. These were Apple Design Awards, Stump the Experts Game, and Movie Night.

Dinner was again quite satisfying and I happened to sit with three ex-Adobe employee's (well, one still worked there) who were ribbing each other about their shared experiences. Happily they let me join in the ribbing and the overall conversation was light and enjoyable. By the end of the meal, they saw some other former colleagues and we parted. There was still time to kill for the activities, so I went and got some cheesecake for dessert (I rarely have dessert). With cheesecake in hand, I sat down with a bunch of Aussie's from all over Australia. Here, again, there was a lot of ribbing but this time along national origins. One of the Aussie's had done graduate work in psychology so he was very interested in our product. This seems to happen a lot here.

I don't want to say that we (the bunch of Aussies and I) hit it off great but they let me tag along to go to an Australia Developer something party in the Fairmont Hotel ... hey, free beer. I gave up trying to pass as an Aussie with my poor accent and just had a good time. The party was great but no music. Only American beer was served, which everyone present seemed to complain about. But, hey, free beer.

After a few beers, I headed back to the convention center, missing the Design Awards, to pick up on the remainder of the Stump the Experts Game. This is a game of Mac trivia and modest prizes: t-shirts, new software, old software, new hardware, and old hardware. One guy came away with a complete Next system! Anyway, some of the trivia is so arcane that the only contribution most anyone can make is to be a bit raucous. And with a few beers in me, that I was (but I didn't get tossed out).

I stuck around for the movie which was "The Matrix." I'd never seen this all the way through and it was great to see it on those big screens.

If you attend WWDC, you should never be afraid to make a comment to start a conversation. Most everybody here is a geek at one level or another (implying a predisposition to a lack of social skills) and so they welcome any opportunity for interaction. Also, as long as you are civil and polite no one will ever not answer your questions. A sense of humor is a plus. Therefore, it is easy to strike up conversations at this conference with nearly anyone. That's exactly what this conference is for; you don't know who you'll meet and what interesting things you'll learn.

This ended the days events. Another long day but very satisfying. Tomorrow we begin to get into the real nitty-gritty (what the conference is all about).