I attended WWDC 2008 this past week. I’ve always wanted to go, but its always been too far away and way too expensive.
I’m glad to report that I had a really great, and very productive time there.
Mac developers are a very small community and this year there were loads of people new to the platform, starting to develop for the iPhone. Thats really great and with the iPhone 3G and the App Store I’m pretty sure that anyone developing quality commercial software for the iPhone is going to make a a killing. I do however hope that the current Mac ecosystem, where allot of the available software is free and of very high quality, persists on the iPhone.
Also, the more people who know Objective-C, the better (IMHO). Its a fantastic language and in comparison to C++ it’s really easy to learn (took me about a week to get to know it and another couple of months to get a good hang of the various patterns used when developing with it - contrast that to the 10 or so years it takes to become really proficient in C++).
For me the best part of the conference were the labs where you can meet with Apple developers and ask questions. This was a fantastic resource and I found the Apple engineers, as expected, to be both incredibly knowledgeable and nice. Its unfortunate that this is the only time of year where developers outside of Apple can meet with the company’s engineers.
What excited me most about the conference was to see how healthy the Mac platform is nowadays and how much Apple is still innovating and moving things forward.
It’s going to be another great year for the Mac.
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