The week took a distinc turn for the better Thursday night at WWDC.  Tim and I had pretty much finished eating and walked up tot he upper level of the Yerba Buena Gardens park to get a bird’s eye view of how many people they could actually pack into this relatively small park.  5200 people attended WWDC and I didn’t think they could all fit, but apparently they could, but it was very tight.  While eating our Klondike bars and people-watching, Phil Schiller came on the music stage to announce the band for the night.  I was expecting a local SF group, to stay for a few songs, then head out.  When he announced it would be BNL, I turned to Tim and said “We’re Staying”.

What  a great show.  I wish the set was longer, but the extra value of the show was that the band are real Mac-heads and related extremely well to the crowd with some inside-politics types of jokes that only Apple fans would get.  They made a real connection that even people who didn’t really know their music (Tim) enjoyed.  In the video below (not taken by me) they tell Phil Shiller to stick around after he introduces them because “They will need him for some product demos later in the show”.

This morning when I woke up, I Google’d “Barenaked Ladies WWDC” and the first hit I got was of someone’s Flickr posting of this image.

Thats the back of mine and Tim’s head.   I think that is our better side.

I guess in the end all I wanted to say was “Great call Apple!!”

Currently I’m sitting in the “Information Technologies” lab at Moscone West at WWDC waiting for a session on OS X administration and….. NOTHING. No planned session it seems. It’s all just window dressing for some open Q&A time. This is fine, but that needs to be said… somewhere…

Yesterday was the Keynote, which is heavily covered all over the web and was about on average as far as Stevenotes go. The OS X state of the Union and OS X Server state of the Union sessions, which lasted the rest of the day, were below average from what I would expect. Little useful information was given. They were quite dissapointing the more I think about them. The only useful piece of info for me was… well.. I can’t say. NDA… But even that one thing wasn’t earth shattering or covered in any sort of detail at all.

At the end of the evening was the welcome reception with a few tables of food, with 5200 people trying to access them. It was totally inadequate for the numbers of people involved. For $1500 I’d expect a bit better treatment, espescially from Apple. I wonder if they are becoming victims of their own success.

So, in-short, long lines, sketchy information, inadequate facilities and poor organization have been they halmarks of the conference so far. I hope it gets better…