No this does not refer to the Western Washington Debutantes Convention. Today is the first day of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. For anyone who writes software for iPhones, iPads, Watches, and Apple computers, it tends to be a very exciting week.
Sometimes there are new hardware announcements and releases. Other times there are big technology changes, such as a new development language (eg Swift!). Every time there are a lot of new technology announcements, that are usually obscure as heck. (eg. a new interface for coding In App Purchases)
Buried among the intimidating amount and complexity of detailed information, there are usually a few fun nuggets of new things I find very cool. So far this year, the best example of this is a new feature in the photos app that detects text in photos. Users will be able to copy text in photos and paste it into any other apps. They will also be able to detect and call phone numbers when they show up in photos. Crazy!
Before Covid, the conference was in San Francisco and the information was really only available to people who attended in person. Some time in the past 10 years the conference became ridiculously over subscribed and it became a lottery to be able to attend. At about the same time the information from all the presentations was made available on line.
The last two years, due to Covid, the conference was entirely online and free for everyone. (Attending in person in previous years typically cost ~$1500 USD.)
I have been to WWDC twice, once in 2004 and once in 2010. In 2004, I was attending with a co-worker who was very much a night owl. He would typically arrive at work around 11am. At WWDC I was very perplexed when he insisted we arrive at 6am for the Keynote Address on the first day that didn’t start until 10am.
When we arrived at 6am, there were already hundreds of people in line. I later realized this was most likely due to the personality cult around Steve Jobs. While I’d like to think I wasn’t susceptible to his reality distortion field, it was still pretty exciting to be in the room for his presentations.