Monday afternoon at WWDC featured a trio of carefully crafted sessions in the keynote room. Pretty slides, well-practiced speakers and an obvious marketing blitz. At times it felt like watching an infomercial. Essentially a big rah rah to get developers excited about new capabilities in the OS X and iPhone platforms.
The first afternoon session was a broad overview of the OS X and iPhone platforms and how the conference sessions were mapped to that. Next there was a more in-depth session about three of the key CORE OS technologies they want to push: Bon Jour, Grand Central Dispatch, and 64 Bit. The third session was going to be about XCode and Interface Guilder but I needed a break. The snacks were typical developer fare: Doritos, soft drinks, and coffee. But also fruit, so I grabbed a couple of bananas.
I decided to go sit in the room where my first break-out would be held. It turned out the unused rooms had video feeds from the keynote room. So I was able to view the Dev Tools session while I did some email. There were only about fifty other people in there. It was just as well that I arrived early because as the Tools session ended, my room quickly filled up.
The first break-out session I chose was an Introduction to Objective C, the language of iPhone development. I figured I would be in the minority in terms of overall interest in this session. Nope. About a thousand people showed up. We were packed solid in theater style seating. It was good information but the room was not really conducive to serious learning.
The session helped me understand the differences from other object-oriented langues. I’d been working through an iPhone tutorial at home with sample files. So I was able to recognize the various code elements.
Tuesday morning had three sessions going on that I was interested in so I took a taste of each. I started with the one I already new the most about: Intro to iPhone Development. It didn’t tell me much I didn’t already know. Except for one thing. As I crept out of the session I scanned the crowd of about six hundred people. If there were more than ten female faces I didn’t see them. The guys with pony-tails outnumbered the women. It is surprising that such a cutting-edge industry is still so skewed in gender. What is it? The nature of the work? Barriers to entry? Cultural leanings? Whatever it is, there is clearly some kind of disconnect in getting women involved in software development.
The majority of the attendees were in the session on iPhone User Interface Design. The presenter went through Apple’s ideas of best practices for using the various standard UI objects in different contexts. There were examples for different categories of apps: “Serious” tools, “Fun” tools, Entertainment, Utilities, etc.
About twenty minutes of the session was dedicated to paper prototyping. According to the Apple speaker, paper proto-typing is the way to go during the design phase of iPhone apps. In usability circles this would not be cutting-edge news. The number of developers present for this relatively basic sessions would indicate that there are a lot of opportunities for designers to get involved with iPhone development.
The session ended with a note about the importance of increasing the fidelity of the app for product differentiation wherever possible. This is where I think that crafted UA fits into the picture. For those developers wanting to stand above the crowd, improvements in UI text can be an important factor.
I stopped in for the Q&A in a session about the Safari browser. I was able to get some useful info from the Apple guys about how the UIWebView embeds and scales HTML/CSS content in the iPhone. One of my iPhone clients is using this method for delivering the Help topics we are working on. I was having problems getting the standard Helvetica font to display correctly. They also had a good tip about using CSS Media Query as a way to single-source web-based content for optimal display in the iPhone or a full-service browser.
