August 29, 2006
WWDC recap
What's the expression? A day late and a dollar short? Well, I'm a couple dollars short, and several days late. Sorry. But here it is anyway....
(Originally supposed to be posted on 8/14, but delayed in part due to "The Terrorists")
The trip to the WWDC has been interesting. I've never been before, so it was bound to be an interesting experience.
The flight from JFK to SFO was mostly uneventful, except for taking quite a bit of time to get off the ground - I was worried about the amount of fuel we were using just sitting on the tarmac. Not my problem, as I'm not the pilot....
Anyway.
Once I got to San Francisco and got settled into the hotel (the Renaisance Parc 55), I ran over to Moscone West to get my credentials for the show - a badge and schedules for the different sessions - as well as my attendee gifts: a nice laptop bag, a t-shirt and a coffee cup.
Sunday night was a "MacEnterprise" gathering - it's a mailing list for people who manage Macintosh computers. We met at the Thirsty Bear, which had us up on the second floor. It turns out that Apple decided to sponsor the event - which was quite nice. I sampled a couple of their micro-brews - they were very nice. I also enjoyed the company of my fellow geeks while we had some very tasty appetizers.
The 
morning of the keynote, I was up at 6:00 so I could make my way to the Moscone center to attend. The Keynote wasn't scheduled to start until 10:00, but apparently people start lining up at about 6:00 and earlier. My biggest concern was making it so I could get into the main room to watch the keynote "live" instead of in an overflow room and watching it on the big screens.
It would have been the same either way, but there's just a little something more "fun" about being in the same room as Steve and the keynote.
You've
probably read or heard about the announcements, so I won't go into any detail about them - except to say that I was quite pleased to hear about some of the new stuff in Leopard, and I loved hearing that there is new hardware coming.
The
new Mac Pro looks awesome - I had a chance to look at the new boxs at the show, and they're very cool. The expansion to 4 drive bays and two optical drives is nice, and the overall flow of the machine is much nicer. The addition of 64-bit processing and subsequent changes in memory - up to 16 gb - is going to make some computing applications very fast.
Some of the technologies built into Leopard are very cool - TimeMachine, for example, is going to make many System Admins very happy, since it lets the users backup their own data, as well as restore it at will. This alone will prevent more than a few headaches on my campus.
Posted by adam at August 29, 2006 11:38 PM | TrackBack