WWDC 2008 - Day 1

I'm on the southbound Caltrain riding home after the first day of WWDC 2008. The line this morning at shortly past 7 am was pretty long but still bearable: The keynote address was pretty interesting but a little lengthy. They didn't have to showcase THAT many iPhone apps. It's always fun to see Sega's Super Monkey Ball, though. The big news were or course - as expected - the 3G iPhone with GPS built-in. And the even sweeter part of that announcement was the price point of $199. Steve Jobs said that it would not cost more than 199 Dollars(!) in any of the participating countries. That includes Germany, but we'll see if he really meant "Dollars" because that would translate to about 130 Euros. Either way, even 199 Euros would be a very sweet price! The next major release of Mac OS X called "Snow Leopard" was another expected announcement and Developer Previews (which I'm not allowed to talk about...) were handed out after the Mac OS X State of the Union session. That release will put some extremely powerful technologies into the hands of developers by means of Grand Central easy multicore support and OpenCL! I was blown away by some of the demos that were shown in the 3 State of the Union sessions I attended in the afternoon. I also met Aaron Hillegass again, which is always a pleasure because he's such a genuinely friendly guy! And I met some other interesting developers that I had some very nice and in-depth (=utterly geeky) conversations with. All in all a very successful first WWDC day.