Periodik Labs

Looking Back at WWDC

Mark Alldritt's thoughts pretty much sum up my own: WWDC was nice, but not earth-shattering. The labs were OK, although most of the answers I was given were of the "hmmm, the guy that can answer that is not here right now" variety. I had one laugh-out-loud moment during the keynote: "Here's your iPhone SDK, it's called a a web browser. Sweet!"

WWDC can be a little frustrating for me. We get to look at all the cool technology in the upcoming Mac OS X release, but I won't get to use it for at least a year or more. That's because our official policy here at the Labs is to support both the current and previous versions of the OS. That means everything we write needs to be Tiger-compatible until Leopard's successor arrives¹.

Over the last few years there's been an increasing IT-related presence at WWDC. Back in days of yore, the conference was 100% developer focused. Now there's a full track devoted directly to IT issues, and a number of sessions that bridge the IT/programming divide. The Bending Directory Services To Your Will: Best Practices session was particularly good (and the roar from the crowd when it was re-announced that "NetInfo is dead!" was amusing).

I can report that Elektron runs on the current release of Leopard, although the UI is a little glitchy. I suspect that this is because Cocoa is still a little rough in this release (other third party apps seem to have the same problems). On the whole, it looks like the transition from Tiger to Leopard will go more smoothly than did the transition from Panther to Tiger.

¹ OK, eagle-eyed observers may have noticed that Elektron 2 requires Tiger, which technically violates our policy — until Leopard ships, we should be supporting Panther. We initially timed the release of Elektron 2 to coincide with Leopard, but then Apple missed their ship date for Leopard.