Another great day in San Francisco! Today was a fairly early one, waking up to book in for a consultation at the conference. Following that, I took a trip to Blue Bottle Coffee for breakfast (my first visit so far this trip) a much loved coffee place by Australians. Short review: Meh, tasted like Gloria Jeans coffee so nothing special.
Following that I headed to Moscone West where I met up with some fellow scholars and spent time playing around with the new iOS 10 and watchOS 3 API’s. I then had a consultation with the App Store team which ended up down the rabbit hole of business model and monetisation strategies. Following this, I attended the session titled ‘Quick Interaction Techniques for watchOS.’ It was fairly interesting.
The best part of the day for me was attending a WatchKit lab where I took in some code I’d been struggling with and had a few Apple engineers take a look and help. I truly expected these labs to be a little daunting, but turns out the engineers are great and are always willing to help. Nothing was too much trouble, and no question was too small either.
The day at WWDC ended with three more sessions:
- Designing Great Apple Watch Experiences (best session of the day)
- Focus Interaction on tvOS (incredibly boring)
- Introducing SiriKit (interesting technology, however not relevant to any apps I ship at the moment due to Apple’s limitations on the type of app that can integrate with Siri)
Dinner took place in Little Italy after a nice walk through the streets of San Francisco, and was followed by a cable car ride back to the room.
Fun fact of the day: I spoke to an Apple engineer in a lab today who told me he gets a little starstruck when he is approached by a developer who he knows and respects, and/or whose apps he uses. Glad I’m not the only one who thinks of great app developers as pseudo-celebrities.
Tomorrow’s agenda: Well I haven’t planned my day properly yet, but I imagine it’ll involve coffee at Blue Bottle (again!), then a handful of labs and sessions at the conference. The highlight will undoubtedly be the WWDC Bash - which is a concert put on for WWDC attendees by Apple each year. Great news for me, Good Charlotte are playing this year! I couldn’t possibly have asked for a better band to play and it’s going to be awesome.
