braindump

Finally, the day is upon us: the start of the Apple WorldWide Developers Conference 2009, the whole reason for my trip. “Today” is 8 June, day 1 of the conference.

Queuing for the Keynote inside

We joined the queue to get into the 10 am Keynote session at about 6:20 am; they eventually numbered us off, and I was 689 in the line. If you’re not aware, the hype of the keynote session is quite extreme. It used to be given by Steve Jobs (Apple CEO), but he’s on six months’ sick leave, so someone else is delivering it today. But all the Apple fanboys are secretly hoping he’ll make an appearance. Even if he doesn’t, there are all sorts of rumours about new products that will be announced, which we’re all keen to hear about.

Waiting for the Keynote

After a couple of hours waiting outside, they started to let us in so we could wait in the ample hallways inside. At 9 am, they let us into the keynote room itself – at least, the first few thousand got in, with the rest accommodated in overflow rooms.

I won’t cover the keynote itself, since that’s been widely covered in the press and elsewhere.

After the keynote, a guy with a small video camera from Bloomberg News asked if he could interview us. We agreed, and he started with me, asking questions mainly about Steve Jobs, his absence from the Keynote, and what it meant for Apple’s business. I don’t know that I had anything particularly enlightening to say, but they used some of it anyway. See right at the end of this video. (Note that if you’re on a Mac, you’ll need to install the Flip4Mac Quicktime plugin to view the video.)

The rest of the day was a series of sessions on the state of progress of various Apple development tools. Unlike the Keynote, all the other sessions are covered by NDA agreements, so I won’t be talking about what they contained. (I’d probably bore everyone here if I did anyway.) But I’ll continue to write about any other highlights of each day.

For dinner, a bunch of us wandered around until we ended up at the food court of the Westfield Shopping Centre on Market St; not quite the dining experience that I was expecting, but at the end of a long day, we didn’t have the energy to look for anything else.