ruminations

Today was the last day of the week long geek fest also known as WWDC. It was a pretty mind melting marathon of sessions, labs and meeting other Mac developers.

Before I went, I read the WWDC 09 survival guide. The information there is super useful, especially for a WWDC newb like me:

http://northisup.com/blog/wwdc-survival-guide-2009-with-additions/

Here’s a bunch of people eagerly waiting in line to get into the keynote (when I arrived at Moscone @ 7:00am, the line was already around 500 people long)

Obviously I can’t talk about any of the session contents because NDA blah blah, but suffice to say that it was a very iPhone centric conference. It was pretty obvious that a lot of people there were eager to get in on the new Gold Rush. Besides the technical sessions, the most enjoyable talks for me were the lunch time talks. I attended 3:

Smule is a company that creates musical instruments you can play on your iPhone. They make great use of all the hardware sensors that are available on the iPhone. The first demo they showed was of a lighter app, except that this was not just ANY lighter app. It had realistic physics, i.e., if you tilt the phone, the flame will keep pointing up. If you turn it 90 degrees, the phoen will make a scorching noise, mimicing what would happen if you held a real lighter to your iPhone. You can also turn the lighter into a blow torch to light up another iPhone that has the app.

The second demo was of the flute app. You hold the iphone like a sandwich and blow into the mic and adjust the tone by pressing down on various areas of the iPhone surface. The presenter demoed the app by playing the Final Fantasy theme song. Big applause considering the audience. What’s amazing is that the app reports back to their server the location of the user. They were able to plot this on a globe and it was really interesting to see which areas of the world lit up, so to speak.

Then the presenter went on to demo Sonic Vox, a real time voice modulator on your iPhone and Leaf Trombone, a Guitar Hero’ish app for the iPhone.

This talk was about technoarchaeology. Not really Mac related, but really fascinating none the less. Basically, they got a hold of a bunch of pictures that the Lunar Orbiter (1986) took on tapes. The project was to attempt to restore these images, which was no trivial task considering how old the tapes were and that no one produced the drives necessary to play them back. Their home base was a recently closed McDonalds. They wanted to use their freezers apparently Anyway, here is one of the images they restored:

The last lunch session I attended as given by the CEO (Neil Young, no relation to the musician) of ngmoco. It was similar to the Smule talk in that he chronicled the life of the company. He was quite candid and shared some very interesting numbers that I bet a lot of people in the iPhone gaming business would die to see. Unfortunately the slides are not going to be available. There was also a brief section on raising money which was not all that revealing. The focus was having the right team, which a) is a no brainer and b) was quite easy for them to pull of since the CEO spent 15 years at EA so was quite knowledgeable about the gaming market.  Key take aways for me were that the iPhone gaming business is really thriving and that you can really build a sustainable business doing it. ngomoco is not only focused on writing hit games however. They have a deeper vision of the market and are building all their games ontop of their gaming platform, which the CEO hopes to be a “lovechild of Xbox Live & Facebook”. Services like Achievements and recommendations are already implemented and he promised more was to come.

I’m quite thankful that my company sponsored my trip and I’m already looking forward to the next one.