Well, I'm back from the OSX Conference, and I've got lots to say. I'll just sort of give a timeline of what happened.

I arrived Sunday evening, and Dave picked me up at the airport. He was in the area for some work that he was doing for sgi. We got a beer, and then I crashed because it was late for me (being in a different time-zone and all).

Monday was the tutorial session- I went to the AppleScript session, and to another one that afternoon that wasn't so great. I did however meet Paul and Quentin of Rogue Amoeba and Brent Simmons of Ranchero and NetNewsWire fame. I had lots of good conversations with these guys throughout the week.

Tuesday was the first real day at the conference- One good session was "Deploying and Maintaining Mac OS X in the Enterprise" by some entertaining Pixar folks.

My absolutely favorite session was this day too- "Incredibly Obvious Software Development Secrets" by Steve Kalkwarf, Bare Bones Software. BBEdit has always been one of my favorite Mac OS X applications, and it keeps on coming out with great new things to make me want to upgrade. Steve went over some of the development techniques that they use at Bare Bones to write their programs. Those guys really know their shit. It was good to hear confirmation on some things that I've been doing for a while, and I also learned a bunch more things that I didn't know about. I'm going to try and adopt everything he said with VoodooPad's development.

I also went to lunch that day with Apple bloggers Eric Albert and Buzz Andersen. They were nice enough to come out and pick me up, and then we had lunch on the Apple campus. Wow, they have a really nice cafeteria! Pizzas made to order! I was in heaven- I was eating my favorite food (pizza) with my favorite toppings (pepperoni and jalapeno) at my favorite computer company! How could it have gotten any better?! Well, by talking about guitars and programming and Apple stuff with Buzz and Eric. It was easily one of the highlights of the week for me.

That evening I went out to dinner with Lynn and Mike as well- we went to a micro-brew and I had a pretty good salmon burger and got to see their swank new cars. It was a fun fun day.

Wednesday was more of the same- I met more fun people and went to some good sessions. That evening however was the "Innovators Special Presentation". They announced the new winners earlier that day, and we all got up on stage and told a little about our products and future directions and such.

Anyway, I got to answer some questions, and give my perspective on issues surrounding independent mac development, and hear other people's as well.

Here are some pictures snagged off O'Reilly's site by D. Story/J.Blanchard/O'Reilly Network.

From left to right, Brent Simmons, Oliver Breidenbach, myself, Sarat Kongara, and Paul Kafasis.


Same folks as above, but with one of the Omni guys included on the left.


The reception afterwards sponsored by Apple's Developer Connection. You can see Brent talking to one of the MacSlash guys (forgot his name too), and Mike Piatek-Jimenez who wrote XRG.

I think I really better write down some of these names and such next time.

Thursday was a good day- we had a good session on NSController by Scott Anguish- and I had lunch with Brent and Aaron Hillegass who is really well known for a couple of programming books he wrote.

The sessions eventually ended, and I showed up in San Fran later on that evening to hang out with Paul and Lynn and Mike and Dave (not Lloyd) and some other folks, and flew back yesterday morning.

It was tons of fun, and hopefully I'll have more to say later... I really want to write up some of the session that Steve Kalkwarf gave.

Anyway- thanks to O'Reilly and all the other folks for making it such a great time.