Days Of WWDC 2008, End of Day Five

Technically the day isn't quite over. I'm at one of the hardware connect stations here at Moscone taking advantage of the sweet ethernet speeds here. Both the new iPhone OS and SDK hitting the hard drive in like three minutes.

Took advantage of the labs this morning and had an Interface Builder engineer give me the guided tour. Less shaky about it now (she called it the fear of the NIB) but I don't think I'm breaking any real NDA by saying that there will be some pretty decent enhancements to IB as the App Store goes live. Since then I've been compiling some notes and playing around with the sample apps. Still a little too conference weary to finish any serious code.

Humorously the kindly engineer was also trying to "trick" me into developing for OS X by starting off with some CoreData examples. Apple is at this weird crossroads. They have this extremely mature, extremely powerful dev platform in OS X which is playing bridesmaid to belle of the ball iPhone. iPhone on the other hand, is still young and growing and a large number of questions at the end of sessions end with "file a feature request."

Apple is listening, and they would love to build the mountain for Mohammed and all, but mountain building takes time. I'm glad for the July 11th release date as it will give the OS more time in the cooker, but honestly I'm more excited for July 2009. Everyone wants to write the first killer app for the platform - but somewhere in the frenzy a level of community will still have to arise.

And I would totally write for OS X if my desktop attention wasn't already driven by AIR in the first place.

Anyway, I've got my files and all my hardware is charged and full. My iPhone is down to a paltry 750MB of space as I jammed it full of video for the long flight home. I'm about to head over to ThirstyBear for some final San Fran microbrew, and then a quick swing by the Wharf before heading home.

See you in like many hours, Chicago.