The FunkeeBlog

The last week at WWDC was AMAZING. I’m finally back home in Singapore where the weather is warm, and food doesn’t come in cold plastic boxes. I’m still feeling the buzz from attending WWDC and trying to catch my breath from all the excitement throughout the week. I’ve also recovered from the jet lag so I can finally post on this blog again.

I know, I know, WWDC concluded last week, and in Internet time, last week is like, oh… 10 years ago in Snail-World Time. But you are all nice people, and i’m sure you’ll forgive me for not posting last week.

Anyhoo.

Here’s my list of tips for future WWDC attendees - won from experience after attending WWDC 2007 - which was the first ever multiday conference i’ve ever attended.

1. Be prepared.

Bring a water bottle. The Odwalla juices on offer are *really* sweet and run out quickly, and there’s no way you are going to stay hydrated from drinking that and coffee/tea all day. There are plenty of water refill stations all over the Moscone.

Bring a jacket/jumper. Unless you come from Norway or Siberia, you’ll probably find the weather in San Francisco really chilly when the wind gets going. Dress in layers. Even if you don’t plan on getting out much, the labs and lunch areas are *really* cold at times too.

Bring extra cash for food. You would think that a conference that costs US$1,500 just for the ticket would serve better food. Unless you’re on a tight budget like me, bring extra cash for getting food outside of the Moscone if you want to keep your spirits up throughout the week. All food at the Moscone is cold, including breakfast. Lunch is served in plastic boxes.

Honestly, I had better food when I served in the Army. Although the Moscone Center food isn’t as bad as unheated combat field rations, it comes really close. Heated combat rations would beat the food at the Moscone hands down. Its scary to think that when it comes to serving hot food to lots of people, the catering people at the Moscone would actually *learn something* from the Army.

2. Get to San Francisco early.

You may have read about my jet lag. Even if you’re on a tight budget, make sure you get to San Francisco at least 3 - 4 days in advance. If you’re flying from halfway across the world, this rings especially true. Jet (or drive) lag will take out a lot of your energy.

If you plan on sightseeing around San Francisco, do it before WWDC instead of after. If you’re a developer, WWDC will give you a huge buzz and you won’t be able to resist quickly flying home after the conference is over to start working on the new stuff you’ve learned.

3. Have a blog or website? Put a picture of yourself or your team online.

There are loads of people who would love to talk to you about your product, your blog or your site during WWDC. The first step in making sure that people can even find you during the conference is to make sure they know what you look like in the first place. Should be pretty common sense eh? But even I neglected to do that (i’ll be fixing that soon).

If anyone at Apple Public Relations is reading this - you may even want to consider placing pictures of Apple engineers somewhere so WWDC attendees can easily track them down for questions. :-)

4. Don’t waste time planning your schedule far in advance.

The session and lab time-schedules change during the conference. You may also change your mind about attending certain sessions during the week itself, so don’t waste too much time planning your schedule too far in advance. Just plan a rough guide during the plane and you should be set.

5. Partition your laptop hard drive before you leave.

If Apple is going to give out a new developer seed during the conference, you won’t be able to resist installing it on your laptop. I’ve personally heard of two fellow attendees who, in the excitement of it all, installed the developer seed onto their existing Mac OS X installation without first backing up. Ouch.

Here’s the better way to do it (Disclaimer: if you lose your data following these steps, its not my fault).

1. Get Super Duper! or the backup utility of your choice and completely back up all the partitions on your laptop.

2. Repartition your laptop to include another empty partition (at least 14GB) for the developer seed installation.

3. Put Mac OS X and your data back onto your laptop again using the backup you created in step 1. If you don’t have sufficient space, try to exclude things that are not needed during the week of WWDC. You can always put all the pr0n back onto your laptop after you return from WWDC.

6. Live close to the Moscone.

Attending technical sessions and labs all day is tiring work. Commuting for a long time after each day at WWDC will quickly sap your energy. Do yourself a favour, and don’t bum off your friend’s apartment on the other side of the city to save a few bucks. Get yourself a room somewhere close to the Moscone and get a lot more energy throughout the conference.

7. Business cards.

Whenever you receive a business card, write a description about the person on the back of the card as soon as possible.

You’ll thank me later when you’re on the plane, sorting through the huge stack of business cards you’ve received, and you’re trying to recall whether “Johnny Foobar” was the guy you met during lunch with an awesome new idea for your app, or the guy that you’re supposed to send a review license to.

If you can control the formatting of your own namecard, you may even want to try placing a picture of your face on your namecard. I don’t know about all you other cats, but I remember faces a lot better than I remember names. Put a picture of yourself online somewhere if you can’t control the design of your own card.

8. Make use of the labs.

Your mileage may vary with the labs, but personally, i’ve got a huge amount of value out of the labs. Broken code got fixed, new features got implemented *on the spot* and magic developer dust was given out. Its been awesome.

If you’re going to the ever-popular UI design consulting lab, arm yourself with the following,

- Prepare a list of questions beforehand. Don’t try to “wing it” at session, you’re just going to waste your time.
- You are only going to be given half an hour with the Apple engineer. Keep questions short and specific.
- Bring a notepad and keep it ready to jot down ideas.

9. Talk to everyone around you.

The food at the Moscone may be tragic, but the lunchtime conversations are awesome when you manage to find the right group. If you’re an indie, you know how hard it can be to get a good technical discussion with anyone in real life, so you really owe it to yourself to find a good lunch group. The amount of energy and buzz you get out of it can carry you for a long way throughout the week.

Don’t limit yourself to lunch either. There’s great conversation to be found just standing in line. Just try not to do that at the long queues for the male restroom.

If you have more tips to share, feel free to leave them in the comments!

I’m really sorry for the lack of WWDC updates which i’ve promised. I’m suffering from a severe case of jet lag for the past week, and the wierdest thing is that although i’m wide awake at the most ungodly of hours, I don’t really have the mental energy to do anything except to stay awake. I’ve tried to beat the jet lag when I came over by trying not to sleep during the flight and only sleeping when I landed, but its not working at all.

The number of hours of sleep i’ve had everyday since i’ve landed in San Francisco:

Saturday: 3 hours
Sunday: 2.5 hours
Monday: 3 hours
Tuesday: 4 hours
Wednesday: 4.5 hours
Thursday (tonight): ???

What happens is that i’ll sleep at perhaps 11pm or so, then for some mysterious reason, i’ll just suddenly wake up in the early morning and i’ll be unable to get back to sleep again.

I can manage to stay awake enough during the sessions and labs in the morning, but it gets *really* difficult during the afternoon sessions, especially those between 3 - 5pm. Worst of all, those sessions in the afternoon are frequently the most interesting ones. :-( I try sooo hard to stay awake during those sessions, but its just impossible sometimes.

I’m really afraid to drink coffee too as i’m extremely sensitive to it - i’m known to drink *one* cup at 7 - 8am and then be super hyperactive and awake till around 2am. Its that bad.

This week has been absolutely *amazing* though and I have so much to write and share, but I guess that will have to wait when I return to Singapore and decompress (and hopefully get some good sleep).

Off to bed now! Hopefully, I won’t wake up again at 3am and wonder what the heck is going on anymore.

Good night!

I left early for the Moscone Center this morning to be amongst the first to register for WWDC 2007. Not by choice - i’m having a jet lag, and I can’t sleep (i’ve been awake since 3am). :-(

Without further ado, presenting - the official T-shirt for WWDC 2007.

Power to the programmers

And this is the complete collection of swag that you’ll get if you register at WWDC today.

WWDC 2007 Registration Goodie Bag

From the top,
- WWDC 2007 Laptop Bag - seems like a pretty good bag with a thick, comfy handle.
- Attendee badge.
- WWDC 2007 T-shirt.
- Conference map and schedule cards.

No tumbler, Apple branded stationary or anything else this year it seems. :-( Hopefully, there’ll be more swag given out tomorrow!

This week, i’ll be experiencing quite a few first-ever experiences.

First time flying on an airline after I switched to a vegetarian diet - I wonder how vegetarian airline meals are going to be like?
First time attending WWDC - I can’t wait to learn all these awesome new things that are coming on Mac OS X Leopard so I can bring FunkeeStory to the next level. :-)
First time visiting the United States - and its San Francisco! This is going to be huge fun!

I’ll be writing new blog posts regularly this week, so please stay tuned!

I was completely living off my savings when I first started out as an indie last year, trying to get FunkeeStory together, and I found it hard to justify blowing that much money away on attending WWDC 2006. I did not have FunkeeStory anywhere near shipping quality, so all that I could bring over there anyway was a bunch of incomplete, broken code. I wasn’t targeting FunkeeStory as a Leopard-only app either, so it didn’t make much sense to attend.

This year though is totally different.

As I continued working on FunkeeStory and getting it to release, I very quickly realised that there are literally hundreds of different ways that I can improve the app, and there’s also a list of things that came up over the past year that I would love to have Apple engineers help me out with in the labs.

I was a Select member last year, and as part of being a member, it came with two DTS technical support incidents. Those two DTS incidents were worth every cent, and without the help and advice that those DTS engineers gave me, FunkeeStory may have been released 2 months later than it did. That’s right, each DTS incident probably saved me a month of my time each.

So after that fantastic experience with DTS engineers at Apple, I knew that attending WWDC would provide a huge development boost for FunkeeStory. Spending a week at WWDC getting my problems solved right there with Apple engineers, might be equivalent to, oh I don’t know, perhaps saving 3 months of trial-and-error, doc reading, and who knows what else on my own. I can’t wait - this is going to be awesome!

But attending WWDC from Singapore isn’t cheap.

WWDC early-registration ticket - S$2,000
Air ticket to San Francisco - S$1,600
Living in a dorm during the week - S$300
Other expenses - S$300 (estimated - i’m going to try to reduce this amount as much as possible by trying to eat as many meals as I can at WWDC itself :-))

Total estimated cost: S$4,200 (around US$2,800)

Ouch. There’s no way I can afford to go just off my own efforts, time to look for some help!

I first approached MDA for funding under their Capability Development Scheme. I explained to them that my current work (and my future work for the Secret Next Big Project) falls under the definition of “new media” (which they’re trying to bolster development efforts for in Singapore), and WWDC is *the* event for people working on “new media” products on the Mac and the upcoming iPhone. Unfortunately, somehow the MDA doesn’t consider WWDC as an event that they’re willing to sponsor. Hmph, I wonder what kind of events the MDA are sponsoring instead of WWDC.

Thankfully, Apple was a lot more forthcoming with support for indie developers trying hard to make a difference, and I managed to get some assistance from them for attending WWDC. Together with ERS funds (that the Singapore government gave out a few years ago that i’ve got squirrelled away) and some money i’ve got saved up from sales of FunkeeStory, I have *just* about enough to attend without having to live on bread and water when I return.

So a big thanks goes out to Apple, and all the wonderful people who bought FunkeeStory for making this trip to WWDC possible. I won’t let your investment in me go to waste!

Right before I leave for WWDC tomorrow, here’s a new release of FunkeeStory for everyone to enjoy! As usual, this is a free upgrade for all users.

New and improved in FunkeeStory 1.0.9:

• Vastly improved handling of US mobile phone numbers.
• Redundant messages will no longer show up for received MMS from friends who also sent it to other recipients.
• Syncing multiple Treo’s to the same Mac improved - you no longer have to remember to set the handset profile first.
• Improved general handling of phone numbers.
• Contact name list is now sorted case-insensitively.
• Fixed bug with handling of contact names with less than 5 letters.

FunkeeStory - The BEST SMS/MMS backup/viewer for your Treo.

You’re sitting down, basking in the glow of your computer monitor. Suddenly, a magical blue beam comes down from the sky and zaps you right on top of your head. It has a cooling, tingling feeling and then a bright blue light flashes before your eyes.

*ZAP*

You find yourself transported back to year 2000 in front of your Pentium 3 (or G3 Mac?) again, with no memory of the future where you came from.

“Oh oh!”

You see a new ICQ message on your monitor. Its from a mysterious person telling you that in the year 2007,

1. The Mac is going to steal developer mind-share from Windows, and you’ll also see a lot of “I deploy on Linux, but develop on a Mac” people.
2. Ruby is going to be one of the top 10 programming languages.
3. JavaScript is going to be one of the most important programming languages.
(3 statements above from Global Nerdy)
4. Flash is going to win the video streaming war and it’ll be the core technology used by a company that gets acquired by Google for US$1.65 billion. RealPlayer and all the others? Sunk into relative obscurity.
5. Java will be languishing as a language for desktop application AND client-side web development.
6. Perl isn’t cool anymore. None of the Cool Kids seem to learn or use it.

Would you have believed it? Or maybe even call it stupid? Those 6 points above really illustrate how unpredictable the software world can be.

I believe that in the next few years, the number of web sites devoting to the tastes of Alpha Geeks will increase considerably. In the past, we had sites like Slashdot. Now, we have sites like Reddit and Digg, which allows interesting new ideas, programming languages and paradigms to propogate through the entire community a lot faster than ever before.

As a result, the growth in mindshare for fringe technologies that are actually good, will increase dramatically.

So that everyone can laugh at me when I get it wrong in 2014, here are my bets for the changes that will be coming up for the next 7 years.

1. The Mac will get 20% marketshare of the global personal computer/laptop market. This segment of the market will also be the part that really matters to developers - the type that will actually upgrade their computers and buy after-market software. This will have a huge impact on the consumer software developers worldwide as cross-platform functionality can no longer be ignored.

2. Java will no longer dominate as the de-facto server-side programming language in enterprise projects and its importance in academia will be significantly reduced. Erlang, Python and Ruby (for web shops) will hit the mainstream consciousness and replace Java for server-side programming tasks. Python will get introduced in the curriculum of universities to replace Java as the main instructional language.

3. Client-side programming will be dominated by hybrid-apps. Many more apps will use Javascript/HTML/CSS/etc for front-end work and adopt a hybrid approach of using Python (or maybe even Lua) for the bulk of the code, and only leaving some portions in C/Objective-C/C++.

4. Functional programming languages will (finally) hit the consciousness of the mainstream developer. Functional programming will be taught to first-year computer science students.

It’ll sure be interesting to see which of these things I get right or hopelessly wrong in 2014! Here’s hoping this site even exists at that time. :-)

If you have the latest Palm Treo 755p, I would love to hear from you!

Being an independent developer, my resources (especially financial ones) are scarce so I can’t afford to buy every single Treo model in existence for testing. Although i’m quite sure FunkeeStory should continue to work with this latest Treo since I didn’t see Palm reporting any changes in its Messaging application, its much better to be sure!

So if you have a Treo 755p, please download FunkeeStory and give it a try on your Mac, and let me know the results by leaving a comment in this post, or sending me an email through the contact form.

Thanks!