Wow. We covered a lot of good material today. From advanced debugging techniques to recommendations for best practices in app design it was all very helpful, though again quite boring to a non-developer audience.

The lunchtime talk was about a techno-archeology project is using Macs to reconstruct moon image data from original NASA analog recordings. The central problem they experianced is that although the media is in good shape, there were no tape machines capable of reading it! Fortunately a couple of units were found in storage on military facilites and were able to be rebuilt for the task.

I’ll keep this one short as the next presentation is starting now. After this it’s party time!!

Today brought a lot of technical details which were important but very boring to the casual audience. I spent a good chunk of time in the iPhone lab, talking to Apple engineers and others while fixing bugs in our app. Plus, one of the sessions gave me a bunch of ideas to improve the performance and look of the app. Hopefully we can start getting them approved very soon!

The highlight of the day from a theatrical perspective was the lunchtime talk given by Dr. Ge Wang, CTO of Smule. The apps produced by Smule are audio related, from the sonic lighter (a flame that you can blow out by blowing on the iPhone microphone) to various insturments that are played by pressing various “holes” or sliders on the iPhone screen and blowing into the microphone. There are a lot of other neat features, like being able to hear & see music played by others across the world, but I won’t go into all the details.

The interesting part of this story is that in less than a year, one of their apps was downloaded over one million times. At $0.99 each, less 30% to Apple, that works out to be $700,000 from a single app. Not too bad for a company that didn’t exist a year ago. So, it seems clear that if you can produce a compelling app, there is money to be made. The question is then what makes a compelling app. Clearly a flame that “burns” on the screen has no useful value, yet many people paid for it. Of course most in the audience were no doubt thinking along the same line.

Nonetheless, we were treated to a performance by the Stanford Mobile Phone Orchestra (or MoPho). It was … interesting. I took some photos, but they are unbelievably bad. Perhaps if I had an iPhone 3GS they would have turned out.

Ok, if you are going to hand out cards inviting all the conference attendees to a “party” (i.e. captive demo) and promise free drinks & appetizers, it is a good idea to make sure you have enough free drinks and appetizers to go around. After all, if you can’t organize a party, how can I possibly believe that you can build a functional product.

I’m talking to you Parallez & Appcellerator (or however you spell it).

We’ll see if tonight is any better …

Today, I attended a session on networking and a couple of game overview sessions. The networking session was interesting, though not in a way that any non-developers would care about. The games sessions were interesting, since I haven’t done much in the way of game development in the past, though this may change.

The capabilities of the new OS, especially with the new hardware are absolutely fantastic. We’ve had accelerometer control since forever, which is just neat. Now, we add peer to peer gaming via bluetooth or WiFi so that users can have multi-player games across the room or across the world. The new phone adds a GPU, allowing amazing video effects. The addition of OpenAL means that 3D sound can be part of the game experience as well. (There’s also a magnetometer/compass, though it isn’t clear how that helps game development, but I’m sure someone will do something cool with it.) In one of the sessions yesterday it was mentioned that a high percentage of the apps up on the App Store are games. It is clear that Apple recognizes that the iPhone is not just a smart phone, but is poised to become a leading mobile game platform as well.

In many of the sessions, I find myself pulling out my iPhone or MacBook to jot down another idea for an application or product. Apple has provided developers with a lot of tools to express their creativity without having to keep track of minor details. It makes the idea of going back to the day job even more depressing, since I know that my employer has no incentive or motivation to explore these technologies, even though they could be tremendously useful. (No doubt there will be a post on this topic at some point in the future, though probably not soon.)

On an unrelated note, I was able to fix a serious bug in an app I have in development after talking to some of the Apple engineers in a lab. And, we don’t even have to mandate 3.0 for our users as I first feared. Now, I just have to re-submit the fixed version and then off to find a party…

Well, I don’t think I’ve seen so many geeks in one place. Not even engineering school! As I write this I am sitting on the second floor of the Moscone convention center watching a couple hundred guys (oh and I can see 4 women — wait there’s another!) with their Macs out, posting on their blogs. (Yep, that includes me.)

The morning got off to a disappointing start when arrived to find the line wrapped all the way around the block. Unfortunately, it didn’t start moving until about 5 minutes before the keynote started, which meant that those of us that didn’t arrive at some obscene hour of the morning didn’t get seated in an overflow room until about 15 minutes in. We missed the launch of a couple of new Macs, but webfeeds indicated it wasn’t anything too revolutionary – just the latest laptop lineup. I talked to a guy who started lining up at 3am(!!), so maybe the overflow room isn’t so bad.

We first learned about the new version of OSX (code name: Snow Lepord). It looks like there are going to be a lot of nifty enhancements to the UI in the Finder, Preview, Safari, and Quicktime. The case for the new Safari was particularly compelling if the claims about page rendering performance hold up. Since it will ship today, I’ll probably switch back from Firefox and see how it goes.

However the OS enhancements that look like they may be the most exciting for developers are the features related to multi-threading, multi-core, 64 bit support, and most intersting, the announcement of what Apple is calling OpenCL. This is a new open standard that Apple is releasing to the community, which is designed to allow non-graphics applications to use the GPU for their computations. This will be huge for scientific computing (hopefully Matlab) as well as programs like Photoshop. It will be interesting to see how Apple applies this technology to the MacBook Air, which has no GPU. Unfortunately, very few details were given for these features. Maybe we will learn more in this afternoon’s sessions.

The last part of the Keynote was about the reason I’m here: The iPhone. There are many new neat features that will open up a huge number of possibilities for all of us here. Some of the highlights are: peer to peer via bluetooth, opening up support for accessory hardware, and support sharing the cell network to your laptop and MMS support, pending carrier support. But, unlike the rest of the carriers in the world, it turns out that AT&T won’t be supporting these technologies right away. This revelation drew laughs and heckles from the crowd. I sincerely hope that someone from AT&T was in the room to hear it, since I’m pretty sure that most of us would drop our AT&T contract in a second if there was another US carrier that supported the iPhone.

Finally, a new model of the iPhone was introduced. The new phone will have a faster processor, better camera and voice recognition. Of course everyone (including me) will want the new one, so I’m wondering who I can sell my current 16GB iPhone 3G to. It was also announced that the price of the current 4GB iPhone 3G would drop to $99.

 AFTERNOON UPDATE:  The only way to describe the new developer tools: kick ass. The static analysis tools are revolutionary; the software can automatically find bugs like memory leaks and even logic errors without even running the code. This is amazing, both in terms of technology and ease of use. I can’t wait to try it.