It seems to me that that tweet I posted earlier needs more than the 140 characters alloted by Twitter. Also I tend not to remember my dreams, so this is a bit unusual and I wanted to write it down before I forgot. My dreams aren’t as lucid as Kat’s, but I’ll do my best.

Near as I can remember I was riding a forklift while being pursued through some sort of warehouse. Or maybe I wasn’t being pursued and just wanted to see how fast I could drive a forklift. In any event, I came to an obstacle that the forklift could not go over and so I climbed over and found myself in something like a break room…

It contained a drafting table and Gus Mueller was at the table writing some code or something. The guys from Rogue Sheep were there and I think Jalkut was rummaging through some cupboards. I dunno, but it quickly became apparent that we were in San Francisco getting ready to go to WWDC. Anyway, I was like “Hey Gus, what’s going on?” to which he replied that everyone was waiting for the ride to the Moscone to arrive. Apparently Apple was picking up groups of developers in limousines and several people had already left. Oh? I hadn’t heard about this I informed him. Someone else asked if I’d registered on Apple’s new DTS site. I informed them that I was just on the ADC site and figured that was good enough but apparently not having registered with DTS was why I didn’t know about the limousine rides. It seemed kind of silly to ride a couple blocks to the Moscone center, but I didn’t wanted to be left out and so I left to go and see if I could register in time to get my ride.

The registration process was edited from my dream as was the trip from the warehouse break room thingy to a hallway in the hotel or the lobby or something. Anyway after I was registered I started getting messages from the DTS site like “Flying Meat wants to be your friend”. This new site was some sort of Facebook / LinkedIn mashup for developers. It was terrifying. And yet I dreamed on…

There were displays in the hotel showing what appeared to be Twitter updates from various conference goers. Mostly these seemed to be updates from people that had arrived (via limousine) at the Moscone center. One tweet, and I couldn’t figure out who it was from, said “Calling somemomintn”. somemomintn is my wife’s unused Twitter name, so naturally I was thinking who the hell is calling my wife!? And where is my limo!?

So what does this all mean (besides that my wife is clearly having an affair with a Twitter user). Near as I can tell Apple must be buying Facebook and I assume Mark Zuckerberg will be using the proceeds to ferry all the developers to the conference via limousine. You read it here first.

For the average user, Leopard adds Time Machine, Spaces and assorted enhancements to existing applications and OS functionality. These things are nice, but $129 nice? <shrug> But wait! Jobs spoke of “Top Secret” features that could not be revealed during his keynote at WWDC 2006. I expect we’ll finally find out what those top secret features are during the next WWDC keynote on June 11th.

With that in mind, I turned to the WWDC07 schedule and noticed something a bit odd. It seems to me that there aren’t so many TBA/TBDs in this year’s schedule. These holes usually indicate one of two things: a topic on a feature that hasn’t yet been publicly announced, or a repeat of a popular session. The repeats typically are scheduled later in the week. Usually Friday afternoon. This year there are 20 sessions that have not yet been announced. 11 of those are on Friday.

Now it just so happens that I still have my WWDC 2004 conference guide. You may recall that Tiger was introduced at that conference. WWDC 2004 also marked the final appearance of Jamba Juice at WWDC. <wipes away a tear>. Anyway, the schedule was riddled with 31 sessions to be announced. Only 9 of those were on Friday.

Given the scarcity of unannounced sessions this year, versus years past, it seems probable that the most of Leopard’s big features have either already been announced or will be unrelated to the Mac developer community. I really hope that I’m wrong and Leopard has a lot more tricks up its sleeve that developers will be able to take advantage of, but I’m not going to get my hopes up. At the very least I hope there are a few more really compelling features to encourage users to upgrade so we can take advantage of all the improvements made to the development process. Hopefully much more than a coat of paint to the GUI. If the GUI is updated, new guidelines with lots of sessions would be great. Oh, and I really hope there’s Jamba Juice… and backpacks… and a pony! I want a pony!

Sunday: My flight arrived in Oakland around 4:30PM, where we were met by Scott Naylor, a Griffin associate, who took us into San Francisco to check into the hotel. Next we checked in at the Moscone and went on a “short walk” to Coit Tower, followed by collapse dinner at Fog City Diner. Note to self: Begin regular visits to the Y.

Monday Morning: I met Mike Ash from Rogue Amoeba while waiting in line for the Keynote. Mike and I got along well and had several discussions before the conference ended. The Keynote started well enough, though the Windows bashing is getting a bit tiresome from my perspective. I watched the rundown of the top 10 features in Leopard waiting for the one (or more) items that would amaze me. Sadly there wasn’t one. It certainly seems “nice”, but nothing I would just have to run out and get I think. I was really disappointed about the “Top Secret” features that were being kept hidden, ostensibly to prevent Microsoft from copying them any sooner than they have to. I expect the reality is that they simply weren’t demo ready.

Monday Night: At the reception dinner, we caught up with Rich Wardwell from Landmark Digital Services and then headed over to Buzz Anderson’s Weblogger’s Party. I met quite a few folks here, among them Gus Mueller, Martin Pittenauer, and Brent Simmons. All super nice, though I think I might have freaked Gus out a bit at first, as I began my introduction by saying “I’ve got something for you” while reaching into my backpack. Perhaps he was worried I was a disgruntled VoodooPad user that had snapped. It was all good though. I brought him a promised PowerMate. I also met Scott and Jenny Ellsworth. Scott’s a new hire at Google (you may have heard of them). I spent most of the evening talking to the two of them about all manner of things including the interview process at Google. Fascinating stuff and also very nice people.

Tuesday Morning: During one of the morning sessions I noticed a guy wearing a Nashville Predators jersey and just had to find out who this might be. Turned out it was Justin Williams aka carpeaqua. Justin will be moving to Nashville sometime around the beginning of next year bringing the total number of Mac developers in the area to something like 4. Sadly, we didn’t get much chance to talk though.

Tuesday Evening: After eating something vaguely resembling pizza and vaguely tasting of cardboard coated in Elmer’s glue, the Apple Design Awards began. All of the winners (though the Automator action category was a bit of a head scratcher) were examples of excellent software. Congrats to all the winners. After the ADA’s came Stump the Experts. Which, for whatever reason, wasn’t quite so good as last year. Finally after Stump, I caught up with Rob Barris from Blizzard who told me all the secrets regarding the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft… not really though.

Wednesday: (Note: this may have actually happened Tuesday, but I couldn’t think of anything else terribly interesting from Wednesday so we’ll just pretend) Whilst standing out front of the main entrance to the Moscone, I was approached by a couple guys (OK, I know this was San Francisco, but it’s not what you’re thinking) whom I chatted with for a while. Turns out they were from Baca Film and found me relatively interesting somehow. They asked if it was okay to interview me… on camera. Being the ham that I am, of course I consented. I’m not 100% sure what they’re up to, but I think maybe they’ll be slip my interview in between that of Woz and Andy Hertzfeld.

Interlude: This would be a good time to say that while the preview of Leopard didn’t exactly blow me away, the same can’t be said about the work being put into the next iteration of XCode and company. The NDA prevents me from going into details, but suffice to say, there are some very nice changes in store for developers in this department.

Thursday Morning: The news of the plot to blow up the airplanes leaving England didn’t exactly start the day off right, but fortunately the news was of arrests and not actual death and destruction. Still I was a bit uneasy about having to fly across country in a couple days. I put the troubling morning news behind me and headed to the conference where I had lunch with Dominic Feira from Ambrosia Software. We chatted about interesting new things going on there and at Griffin, the conference and finally a long bit about coding conventions. The sort of thing that would put normal humans to sleep.

Thursday Evening: Beer! The Apple Campus bash was a lot of fun. Although again I did not manage to beat the line to the Apple employee store. We even traveled by car and beat all the busses there. When I do manage to visit, I expect I’ll be extremely underwhelmed but I can’t imagine what it is that compels folks to stand in line for hours and hours while a perfectly good party is going on inside. The music this time around was performed by bt. I’d have to say I approved enthusiastically.

Friday (aka tourist day): WWDC 2006 wrapped up at 12:30PM leaving the rest of the day to play tourist and finally eat some decent food. Among the tourist stops, Coit Tower, Lombard Street, Golden Gate Bridge, Fisherman’s Wharf. By the end of the day I was beat and ready to head home.

Saturday: I was a bit worried about getting to the airport with enough time to pass through the mess I expected to be waiting for me there. It wasn’t much fun, but it wasn’t terrible either. About an hour or so standing in various lines before I arrived at the gate and finally my flight back home to Nashville.

One more thing… I didn’t get one of these from Steve, so I’ll add my own here. Of course I was running Proxi and I can’t tell you how many people where transfixed when they saw the Bubbles plugin running. I just want to say thanks to all of you for the complements. I think it’s pretty cool too And finally, they were lots of other people that I met during the show that I didn’t mention in the interest of space (note to “Wolf”: definitely leave the quotes escaped next year!), but everyone was very approachable, personable, and / or just generally nice folks. It was a pleasure and I’m looking forward to seeing you all again at WWDC 2007!

• I cracked 1.5 million in Geometry Wars. I’m coming for you BillyBlaze314! Not really. I’m pretty sure he, and anyone else that has topped 2 million in this game, is a cyborg. Genetically engineered superman are real. These high scores are irrefutable proof.
  
  
• I got to ride a Segway! What an awesome contraption. A shame I can’t think of any justification for owning one… yet.
  
  
• We went to see Superman Returns over the weekend. My review: Meh. The Spiderman 3 trailer, however, looks sweet.
  
  
• Another year of fireworks with no severe burns. This year our annual neighborhood fireworks display lasted well over 2 hours and was a blast (get it!? ha!) as usual. Sadly my string of 8,000 firecrackers had to be re-lit a couple of times. Next year I’m going to keep them rolled up I think.
  
  
• My 10 year anniversary approaches and we’re going on a cruise. Neither of us has been on a cruise before. I can’t wait to see Gopher, Doc, Isaac, and of course Captain Stubing.
  
  
• Shortly after the cruise I’ll be heading to WWDC in San Francisco for that latest in Apple developer edutainment. If you happen to be going to WWDC as well let me know. Always nice to meet other Mac developers face to face. There aren’t so many of them here in Nashville.
  
  

Bwahahahahaha!

Seriously guys, when’s the conference?