a blog by Peter Leonard
The day started with lines out the door of every Starbucks within a 5-block radius of the Moscone Center, probably a function of not only WWDC but also the 9am morning rush in downtown San Francisco. I ended up getting the morning latte at an independent place just south of Market:
The ability to take pictures within the conference itself is of course restricted due to non-disclosure agreements, but the public areas outside the sessions and labs were fair game. The theme for the banners this year is Leopard, the upcoming 10.5 release of Mac OS X:
Though breakfast and lunch are technically provided by the conference, there's only so much food-service cuisine you can take. For lunch today we went one block north-east to the new 'wichcraft restaurant, a spin-off of the Las Vegas spin-off of the Craft steakhouse in the MGM Grand.
No Apple conference would be complete without the wall of Cinema Display panels used for scientific visualization and/or animation display. According to an anonymous staffer the company originally didn't realize the opportunity with installations such as this, despite the obvious profit on a dozen 30" displays. Now, however, such display walls are receiving increasing support in graphic tools like Quartz Composer:
Though each session has a string of power strips along the edges of the room, you aren't always guaranteed a charge opportunity if you aren't near the walls. So a vendor set up a special cart with these custom-built Li-Ion battery recharging slots:
