Ioanna's digital perch

Last week I returned from the USA where I attended the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco followed by a 3 day trip to Phoenix, Arizona and the Grand Canyon.

The whole trip was an amazing experience. I’ve been sort of dreaming of attending WWDC for years and never thought I would make it while being a struggling student with little money. But thanks to the Apple University Consortium and their student scholarships, I got to go to this ultimate mac geek event! It was great to live and breathe mac for a week :D.

The week got off to a rough start with my old powerbook’s hard disk dying on the Monday morning before the keynote, which was very unfortunate timing! However, I had been planning to get a new laptop for a while (the 5yo powerbook was getting a little *too* old) so I took advantage of the favourable exchange rate and cheaper US prices and got myself a shiny new 15” Macbook Pro. I’m now running the Snow Leopard developer preview I got from the conference on it and absolutely loving it.

I’m quite excited about some of the new under-the-hood features in Snow Leopard but I can’t talk about them until Snow Leopard is released due to the non-disclosure agreement that covers the entire conference apart from the keynote. Since I can’t really share much about what I learned at the conference, I’ll instead share some photos. The following photos were taken mostly by me except one or two which were taken by other members of the AUC delegation and kindly shared. Speaking of which, it was really great meeting all the other AUC people; everybody was very friendly and interesting.

Outside the convention centre.

On the morning of the keynote.

During the keynote. I was quite happy to get a seat in the second row behind the VIPs.

The App wall, showing the 20000 most popular iPhone apps arranged as a rainbow and rippling whenever an app is downloaded in the app store.

Coincidentally, the JavaOne conference was also taking place at the same time at another part of the huge Moscone complex. Things were much quieter on that side though ;).