WWDC Attendee Guide
Jun 4th
Last year was my first time attending WWDC and I can easily say that it was one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life. My geek squee didn’t shut off from the moment I left SYR until about 3 months after I returned.
I’ve been meaning to put together an attendee guide since I got back, so I figured what better time than two days before I leave for WWDC again this year.
- Pack jeans, t-shirts, and hoodies/sweatshirts/long sleeve shirts. San Francisco is not warm. It was typically between 50º and 65º the entire week last year.
- Stand in line for the keynote. I had a great time standing in line with people I had only known online and who have become good friends.
- Meet people. Many of us geeks are shy and that’s OK, but do yourself a favor and try to break out of your comfort zone and say hi to someone you don’t know. Easy conversation starters include, “Where are you from?”, “What have you worked on?”, and “Wanna see my Steve Jobs tattoo?”
- Find a group to hang out with. I had a really great group of folks that I stuck with for most of the conference last year and it made it a much more enjoyable experience. Go to parties with them, sit with them in sessions, but don’t be exclusive. Remember to say hi to other folks too.
- Go to the sessions. Plan ahead of time by looking at the session list and see which ones interest you and try to hit all of them. There is some amazing information presented in these sessions so soak it all up. The videos that are made available after the fact are great, but only cover about 50% of what you will get by actually sitting through it.
- When you sit down in each session plug your laptop into a power strip and plug your iPhone into your laptop. Yes, even if it doesn’t need it. With the amount of tweeting and texting you will be doing you will be testing the limits of your iPhone battery every single day. NEVER waste an opportunity to charge it.
- Stay hydrated. Drink lots of lots of water to help keep your energy up. If you do this one simple thing you will not tire out the entire week.
- Charge your laptop and iPhone over night every night. It gives you a good jump on the day.
- Use the labs. The labs are basically free DTS incidents where you get to sit face-to-face with the Apple engineers that wrote the code that you are using to create amazing things. Ask them to help you work out an issue that you’ve hit. If you haven’t already done so, start a list of WWDC Lab Questions so that you’re prepared. If you aren’t working on anything or don’t have questions of your own, see if a friend (or a new friend) would mind if you tag along to their lab session. You will learn something.
- Eat the free lunch. I had heard horror stories about the lunches at WWDC, but to be perfectly honest they were pretty good. Sit with folks you don’t know, strike up a conversation, and enjoy the free food. Even if you think the meal sucks, chances are the conversation won’t.
- Go to the bars and go to the parties. Do not go back to your hotel room for more than 15 minutes after the conference ends for the day. Get changed (if needed), take a few minutes to stretch out on the bed and relax, then get your sneakers on and get back out the door. (see #3 above). Even if you are not normally a barfly or even if you don’t drink at all, get out there with a Pepsi in your hand and talk to people.
- Do not get hammered every night. Enjoy the company with a drink or two, but don’t get blitzed. You want to be on your game for the full day of sessions the next day and you don’t want to waste a day puking and avoiding solid foods.
- Use Twitter. Do a standing search for the #wwdc hashtag and get to the good parties and bars.
- Nervous about talking to some of the rockstars in the Mac and iPhone programming world? Buy them a drink and don’t be shy about it. I have yet to see anyone decline free booze at WWDC.
- Bring and handout business cards. Or anything that has your name and info on it. Something that helps me remember who you are. Yes, say what you want about handing out pieces of dead trees and I will no doubt agree with you, but to be perfectly honest the only people that I really remember from WWDC last year are the people with whom I exchanged business cards. When you get back to your hotel for the evening make a note on the cards you received to help you remember something about the person.
- Email the people that you met when you arrive back home. When I got back to SYR I sent out a mass email to everyone whose email address I had acquired just to say “hi” and tell them that I had a great time meeting them. I’ve also emailed this same group a few times during the year just to drop them a line and let them know what I’m working on. It’s a good way to keep in touch.
This is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are the things that really stick out to me from last year. Enjoy and I hope to see you there!
365Cocoa – Day 12: Custom drawing
Mar 11th
As I have neglected to post the second in my series on Cocoa drawing I’d like to point you to 365Cocoa for their next few posts starting with the one linked below. It sounds like they are going to go down the path I intended (and will probably do it better than I could have). Enjoy!
Indie+Relief an Amazing Success!
Jan 22nd
Many congrats to everyone who participated in Indie+Relief. Over $143,872 was raised for the people of Haiti through various charities!
The Awesomeness That Is Bodega
Jan 17th
Let’s get one thing out of the way first thing: I’m a big fan of Bodega and have been since I heard about it firsthand from the guys at centrix.ca during WWDC 2009.
Bodega is a free Mac application that helps you discover and download Mac applications. It is built in the spirit of great software sites like MacUpdate, but takes the experience and puts a great looking Cocoa wrapper around it. Make no mistake, this project is a big undertaking with a lot of moving parts and a lot of coordination between those parts. Yet with steady progress and determination these guys are really crafting something cool.
The impetus for this particular blog post is to gush about what I think is Bodega’s killer feature: keeping track of and installing updates for the applications installed on your computer. I really like Andy Matuschack’s Sparkle framework, but one of the necessary evils of that framework is that it doesn’t notify you that there is an update for a particular app until you run that app. When I launch an application it is done with the intention of performing a task immediately, but if there’s an update for that particular app I am yanked out of my workflow to deal with the question of updating the app first. Yes, I can continue to work, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking about how I don’t have the latest version of the software that I am currently using, and it bugs me.
Enter Bodega. Once every few weeks I will launch Bodega and click on the Applications section in its sidebar which presents me with a list of all the software currently installed on my system*. The killer feature is that Bodega scans all of the Sparkle feeds in these apps and will tell me if there’s an update for any of them. With two clicks (one to download and one to install) I can download and install any of the updates that I want. This simple process greatly reduces the chance that the next time I launch an app I will be presented with the option to download and install an update, Bodega has already taken care of it for me.
If you haven’t downloaded Bodega yet I highly recommend that you do and take it for a spin. If you’re a developer and you haven’t submitted your software to Bodega, I highly recommend that you do that too.
Downloading and installing updates (Stolen shamelessly from the Bodega website)
* Bodega is opt-in for developers, so if a developer hasn’t submitted their software to the Bodega site it won’t know about that software on your computer.
Indie+Relief
Jan 17th
For those that may not have heard, Justin Williams has organized a great effort to provide financial relief to the people of Haiti. Set to take place throughout the day on January 20th, all the proceeds from the sale of participating software will be donated to Haiti. We here at No Thirst Software are participating with sales of MoneyWell and Debt Quencher. For a full list of participating software please check out the Indie+Relief website.
It’s a great cause and I know that I will be checking the list for software that’s on my “to buy” list. I suggest that you do the same.
iPhone Memory Debugging with NSZombie and Instruments
Jan 15th
NSZombie is easily one of the most valuable tools in any Cocoa developer’s toolbox. Check out Mark’s blog for a great introduction on using NSZombie from within Instruments:
iPhone Memory Debugging with NSZombie and Instruments | markjnet.
Thanks to Jeff LaMarche for directing me to Mark’s blog in the first place.
A Successful git Branching Model
Jan 14th
Being a bit of a git newbie I found the following post very useful in setting up our DVCS model. The graphic that leads of the post is a bit intimidating but it all comes together very well after reading through the post. I highly recommend this post to anyone that uses git in a team environment.
Friday Q&A: NSNotificationQueue
Jan 8th
Mike Ash exposes another Cocoa gem this week with his explanation of NSNotificationQueue.
You can read about it here: http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/friday-qa-2010-01-08-nsnotificationqueue.html
Custom Drawing Using drawRect, Part 1
Dec 18th
One of the more advanced techniques for creating custom user interfaces on the Mac is the use of NSView’s drawRect method. Many answers to questions on StackOverflow and Apple’s mailing lists include recommendations to “just override drawRect and do the drawing yourself”. Some folks see this recommendation and their eyes glaze over, thinking that it’s too advanced of a technique for them to wrap their heads around. Over the next few days I’m going to go over some basic techniques that can yield powerful results.
Let’s start by setting up the Xcode project that will be the basis of the rest of these posts.
- Open Xcode and create a new Cocoa Application project called DrawingSample.
- Create a new NSView subclass called CustomDrawingView.
- Open MainMenu.xib, add a new Custom View to the Main Window, set its class to be CustomDrawingView, and set it’s autosizing flags as seen here:
Save and Quit Interface Builder and switch back to Xcode. Open CustomDrawingView.m, it should look like so:
@implementation CustomDrawingView - (id)initWithFrame:(NSRect)frame { self = [super initWithFrame:frame]; if (self) { // Initialization code here. } return self; } - (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect { // Drawing code here. } @end
We’re going to start (and finish) today with just a simple concept and some basic drawing that will set the stage for the future posts. All drawing in Cocoa is done by first setting up the environment in which you want to draw, and then doing the actual drawing. For instance, if we want to draw a blue box, we first have to setup the color blue, define the bounds of the box, and then draw it. In this case we are using the NSRect that is passed to the drawRect method as the box we want to draw, and we setup the color blue by calling [[NSColor blueColor] set]. We then use the convenience method NSRectFill to fill the dirtyRect with the color blue. Notice that we didn’t pass the color to NSRectFill, we set it, and from then on anything we draw will be blue until we change the color.
You can think of drawing in Cocoa much the same way as you would think of painting with a brush. You dip your brush in a certain paint color, paint the shape you want to paint, and then dip your brush in a new color and paint some more.
- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)dirtyRect { [[NSColor blueColor] set]; NSRectFill(dirtyRect); }
The preceding code, when run, will generate a view that looks like this:
Now, this may not look like much, but in future posts we will build on these concepts and, hopefully, by the end have drawn some pretty cool and useful things.
Bottom Bars in Interface Builder
Dec 18th
Dave posts a handy tip for those that may not know that there’s a non-code way of setting up the bottom bars on your windows. Check it out here: Bottom Bars in Interface Builder – Dave Dribin’s Blog.
