Starting today, I'll post photos from our trip on Flickr. To make it easier for you to look at them, I'll try to group them in albums. The first one is already available: Anreise MUC-SFO-Appartment.
Please note: These pictures were taken by @stefale, @breakthesystem, @dfelber and myself.
So long.
Today, the WWDC 2012 came to an end. After the last sessions, we finally took our time to attend the lunch talk. For this last one, Apple invited famous director and screenwriter J. J. Abrams to talk about his company Bad Robot and his story.
It was a really inspiring talk which can be summed up like this: Do bold moves & do things that give you a good feeling.
Of course his words were a bit better, but I'm not good at remembering exact quotes. However I was really impressed by the fact, that he seemed like a pretty cool guy, much more down to earth than one would expect from a famous director.
Overall, this was a great ending for a week packed with amazing new things. I really want to thank my boss, Markus Reimer for making this trip possible.
Now it's time for another three weeks in San Francisco and an awesome vacation. I can't wait for Monday when my girlfriend will finally arrive here, too.
So long.
After a busy day of interesting sessions we grabbed our fancy green wristbands, went home to get some fresh clothes and went straight back to the Yerba Buena Gardens which are next to the big cinema right across the street of Moscone Center to get in line for the WWDC Bash. Apple provided drinks and food and they invited a band called Neon Trees to play live on stage. I haven't heard of them before, but there life performance was pretty great.
If you look closely at the photo, you can see what goes wrong when you put a rock band in front of 5000 nerds. The photo doesn't make it that obvious, but simply everyone was just standing around. Most of them put their phone in the air, but it didn't look like they were having a lot of fun. So we made our way to the front and started the party! Yeah, me. I didn't see that coming. We danced and jumped until our feet hurt, but at the end it was really worth it as at least all the people around us started joining in the dancing and the band seemed really happy too. I tried to catch a few moments on video, but that didn't wok out that well. More dancing, less filming turned out to be the best decision.
Later that night we went to a pub called the Chieftain, where I hoped to meet that Louie Mantia guy and some fellow designers who seemed to have vanished long before we arrived there, which was kind of a bummer. But then I met two coders from taptaptap and many other guys.
It was a great night and really showed a different side of the people at the conference.
So long.
Random sessions & the beginnings of our new app.
We spent half of the day at Moscone, listening to interesting sessions on many new features in iOS 6 and how to use them for our upcoming projects. Again, most of the information is confidential, but it's quite easy to sum everything up in the following way: Apple makes it even easier to create great things than it was already.
Because some of the features just blew us away, we were pretty pumped and started fooling around with some code for the first application that will be released by anfema under our own name. I can't say anything more about it, but it will be a useful little app for developers who have an iPad and use agile development processes (or at least try to). It's a great little side project so far.
Note: we changed our mind since Wednesday, so instead of using features only available in iOS 6, we try to make it work on iOS 5, too. So the app will be available earlier.
So long.
The first two days of the WWDC 2012 are over and the experience is quite unique so far. Let's get started.
Monday we got up really early to make it into the big Keynote, which opens the conference. And we made it! The line was all around Moscone West and we already thought we had to get into the overflow rooms, but we were under the last 50 people to get in the big conference room to see the presentation live on stage.
I wont talk about the details, as most of the stuff is already discussed pretty much everywhere. If you have no clue what's going on, consider watching the official stream from Apple. The new Retina MacBook Pro is a quite interesting device and the display is gorgeous, but I wish they would have made the same design available for the non-retina models as well.
The upcoming updates to OS X and iOS sound interesting and some of the features are really useful, as far as I can tell from the betas, which of course are under NDA, so I won't go into the details there either.
After the Keynote (and another presentation) we went in the city to grab some lunch. I was able to convince my colleagues to visit the Osha, a thai restaurant in the Financial District which is somewhat close to the convention center, and I ate there before last time and the food was as good as I remembered it to be.
Stuffed and happy we rolled back to the conference to see the Apple Design Awards. I really hope that I make an app that gets at least nominated for that price. The winners deserve all their praise, but I'm kinda puzzled that Deus Ex 3 was nominated alongside a lot of indie applications. Maybe Apple should seperate games and applications in some way.
Today the sessions under NDA started with some amazing new features which will make coding for iOS even better than ever before. We really can't wait to use those in our applications. I met @ConnorCimowsky (who currently is an intern at Apple) and we talked about random stuff while grabbing some free lunch. I really look forward meeting more people from my Twitter timeline the next few days.
More sessions after lunch, one of them about workflows in Xcode, which was really interesting and showed that there is much more in that application we use all day than you know about.
Since it was already quite late and we wanted to grab a bite before we go to the famous "Stump the experts" panel, I lead the team to a small place called Louies Bar & Grill, where we had some tasty and kinda "American Style" food.
After the Stump Daniel and I went to the Push.io party, but it wasn't quite to my taste, so I went home to finally write this post.
Now it's time for some more wireframes and design for our upcoming application, as all of us are really excited about the new stuff we learned.
So long.
Many kilometers and 24 hours later, we finally arrived at our apartment. Where do I start? Our landlord? Helpful and friendly. The whole place? Cute, stunning and it feels like home already.
After a relaxed sleep in our gorgous beds, we started our day with a big breakfast (thanks, Daniel) and now we're leaving to discover the city.
So long.
All checked in, waiting at the gate.
So long.
It took me some time to realise, but in less than a week and I will travel to San Francisco again.
This time not only to visit old friends and colleagues, but to be a part of the small team that will represent anfema at the WWDC. Like the last time I will try to blog about the whole trip in this blog, altough some articles will be posted at our company's blog and I'll only link them over here.
Don't forget to contact me if you want to meet me and my friends: @breakthesystem, @dfelber, @stefale, @missnaseweis & Lucy
So long.
I almost forgot to tell everyone: I finally finished the first stage of our new website. Like this blog it uses Kirby for content management. Fancy responsive and @2x stuff is included, too. More detailed content - especially in our quite large but still not completely published portfolio - will be added soon.
After only a few weeks of waiting, I finally recieved my iPhone case from Grove.
I had quite a few things to protect my iPhone 4 over time. Starting with the Apple Bumper, iPod socks and a sleeve by Hardgraft.
The Grove is quite different from what I had before.
Since I haven't dropped my iPhone (yet), I think it's a really sweet case and well worth its price and the waiting. I'm really impressed by the quality of the whole thing and looking forward to their iPad case which will hopefully arrive in time when I visit San Francisco.
So long.