WWDC 2009 will be my fifth time attending as a student. So for all the student developers out there here are some tips. The goal of a student is different from those sent by their companies. For us WWDC is an opportunity to get internships or jobs at some of the top software development companies.

For the keynote:

• Get in line at 4 am, if you want to be first in line, if you don’t care ~7 ish will do.
• Bring food and water, I favor a camelback.
• Bring something to sit on. Or be prepared to stand.
• The line is a networking opportunity.

For inside the conference:

From MacYourself.com:

Most Dashboard widgets are useless pieces of crap. With that said, a good widget can be both fun and useful.

1.) iStat Pro
The ultimate widget to get an overview of everything that’s going on
with your Mac. At a glance you can check your CPU & RAM usage,
available hard drive space, network status & speeds, internal
temperatures, fan speed, battery levels, current processes, and more —
all with a great, elegantly designed interface.

2.) Amazon Album Art
iTunes automatically downloads album cover art for your music, but only
if you have an iTunes account and if they sell the music in your
library. If a song or album isn’t for sale in iTunes, no cover art for
you. This widget will quickly get album cover art from Amazon’s large
database for the currently selected songs in iTunes.

3.) Harmonic
Harmonic makes it extremely easy to get lyrics to your favorite songs.
All you need to do is play a song in iTunes, launch Dashboard, and the
lyrics will automatically display and copy right into iTunes. Lesser
known songs lyrics may not be available, but for the vast majority of
popular music it works great.

4.) xCuts
Remembering all the keyboard shortcuts Mac OS X has to offer is just
about impossible. When you need a good reference for shortcuts, the
xCuts widget will probably have what you’re looking for — right on your
Dashboard. You can even view by category and search the database.

5.) QwikConvert
Apple bundles a widget called Unit Converter with the Mac operating
system, but it’s a bit clunky and slow to work with. QwikConvert,
however, is incredibly fast and offers a ton of conversions that update
as you type. It doesn’t get much better than that.

6.) Asteroid Run 2
I don’t normally like games on my Dashboard because they suck up system
resources and fill valuable screen real estate. Asteroid Run 2 has me
hooked for some reason, though. It’s a fun little time-waster where you
navigate your spaceship through an obstacle course of asteroids to pass
through a series of loops before time runs out. It’s fairly challenging
and has decent graphics, so it’s definitely worth a try.

7.) Time Machine Buddy
Time Machine is an excellent feature introduced in Mac OS X 10.5
Leopard, but it doesn’t give users much feedback in terms of what’s
going on behind the scenes. For most people, that’s exactly what they
want. For others like me, a little more information is good to have.
The Time Machine Buddy widget will display the system logs generated by
each backup, whether they are in progress or already completed.

8.) Recently Added Widgets
If you’re always looking to make new additions to your Dashboard, this
is the perfect widget for you. It keeps you updated on the latest
widgets by grabbing the feed from Apple’s website to display the 20
most recently posted Dashboard widgets.

9.) iPassword
For some security freaks, a simple word-based password is the
equivalent of a technology sin. They can be easily cracked, which
leaves your online accounts open to hackers. The iPassword widget helps
to alleviate this risk by randomly generating stings of text and
numbers (at a character length of your choice), which you can use as
passwords when you sign up for new accounts on the web.

10.) Apple Retail Store Event Widget
Some people may not be aware that Apple Stores regularly hold free
events and workshops to teach visitors how to perform certain tasks on
a Mac, like creating a home video in iMovie or a song in Garageband.
This widget provides a list of upcoming events at your local Apple
Store so you know when to stop by for a presentation that interests you.

11.) gMap
Get Google Maps on your Dashboard with this lightweight, easy to use
widget. You can zoom in & out, use a variety of views (map,
satellite, and hybrid), and even set your home address as a reference
point. Sorry, no turn-by-turn directions though.

12.) UpcomingBirthdays
Forgetting birthdays of friends and family is a big problem for a lot
of people. It’s not that you don’t care… you’re just so busy you don’t
even realize, right? Unfortunately, that excuse can only work so many
times. This helpful widget takes your contacts’ birthdays from Address
Book and displays them so you can easily see when there’s one on the
way.

$defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add '{ "tile-type" = "spacer-tile"; }
$killall Dock


The separator will appear next to the last permanent application in your dock. Drag them around to where you want them! Run it again for another separator. To get rid of a separator right click it and select “Remove from Dock.”

[singlepic=6,425,350]

For inside the conference:

• Checkin on Sunday, as students we get there a day early, use it to check in. You’ll be glad when you are first in line for the keynote instead of first in line to get your badge.
• Bring a laptop. This is a must, as somebody said last year “going to WWDC without a laptop is like sending soldiers to battle with bananas instead of guns.”
• Put your name on your power adapter and bring your extension cable for it. This is a must for so many obvious reasons, but all I have to say is that I ended up with somebody else’s power adapter, and you do NOT want to find yourself in a session a power adapter that may be incompatible with your generation of laptop. When you are constantly compiling code your battery does not last long.
• Take advantage of the sack lunch sessions. These are usually non technical talks done by invited guests such as Guido van Rossum or somebody from Pixar. These sessions are “big picture” and among the most memorable.
• Take notes, but don’t take notes alone, get SubEthaEdit. Nothing beats collaborative text editing. I actually got a job interview at Apple by chatting with one of my fellow note takers.
• They give you a really nifty bag, don’t use it. Everybody is using that really really cool bag and I know too many people who have lost theirs amongst the confusion. I had to beg for a new bag my first year after mine was taken. Also it’s usually a messenger bag and for all that is going on a backpack is better.
• There is no need to stock up on Odwalla Juice, they never run out and it is delicious, oh so delicious.
• Have several copies of your resumé ready; there is a student job fair. This is a major networking opportunity. I have never left a WWDC without a job interview with at least two companies, one of which was Apple. The old timers will go on and on about how “WWDC is going down hill,” smile and nod, try to steer the conversation on how to get into a mac software company.
• Have an elevator speech ready. You won’t have much time to pitch yourself during an impromptu interview. Practice on your 3 minute spiel on why you are a good fit for an awesome company. Did you do research? do you have a pet project? both of these are good things to talk about in your elevator talk.
• The best session is Stump The Experts. Get there early, it fills up. If you want a t-shirt the easiest way is to ID a walk in song (I have 2 hats and one t-shirt thanks to paying attention to the walk in songs).
• Don’t waste your time playing video games. WWDC has a great showcase of the best of Mac gaming, it is very easy to get sucked in while playing Doom on a 30″ Apple Cinema Display with Bose simulated surround headphones. I missed many manny sessions my first year due to this deadly combination.

For outside the conference:

• Go to WWDC parties. I remember the WebKit launch party was pretty awesome, these are both educational and social opportunities. We are all nerds, we talk about code all the time, just sometimes its nice to do with a beer in your hand. This year somebody made a list of some here. Again these are really good opportunities to meet developers and network.
• San Francisco was made for walking. You have a lot of time on Thursday and Friday as the conference winds down, use this time to see the sights. 
• The Moscone Center has good food, just not always for lunch. If you aren’t going to a sack lunch there are several good restaurants within two blocks of the conference. If you want to skip lunch go check out the Metreon just across the street or Mel’s Diner, on Mission, southwest of 4th.
• The House of Nanking is the best chinese food I’ve ever had.
• Do NOT wear the shirt they give you, or any apple bling for that matter, we all have it, it does not impress anybody there. Graphic tees are cool tho…
• Stop by the Apple Company Store. Last year the Developer Bash was in Yerba Buena Gardens, not 1 Infinite Loop, but its worth catching the train down for. It is the only place you can get Apple coffee mugs, Apple toilet seat covers, Apple… you get the idea.

Things that just don’t work yet:
Real Media and Windows Media formats
Malformed stream URLs
The remove stream button
and likely more…

I have noticed a sizable gap in the offering of radio widgets. Each widget is specifically programmed for a single station or small group of stations. Of the hundreds of radio widgets there is no single widget that can play a stream based of user input.

The first version I will be releasing soon allows users to add and remove streams from a playlist and select which kind of media player the stream requires. It will also be ‘garbage in garbage out.’ Version two will include code that will automatically determine what player should be used and if that player is actually installed. Furthermore version two will be able to check as to if the stream entered is a valid stream.

This product has been focus grouped to death.

I don’t know if you have ever taken part in consumer research surveys, but let me give you a little idea of how they go.

How important is the easy access of the following features on a 1 (low) to 5 (high) scale:
1 2 3 4 5 Red eye reduction
1 2 3 4 5 Flash toggle
1 2 3 4 5 White balance adjust
1 2 3 4 5 Sport mode
1 2 3 4 5 3D
1 2 3 4 5 Video
1 2 3 4 5 …
and the list goes on.

To today’s consumer almost all of these buzzword loaded features seem important, so of course we will see a majority of 4s and 5s. Apparently somewhere in the translation of the survey “easy access” becomes “has its own button.”

A perfect example of innovative thought and engineering is Apple’s iPod. The first thing they did was eliminate a button by realizing that play and pause are mutually exclusive. Meaning you can either play music or pause music, never both, thus the buttons were combined to a play/pause button. Years later there are still devices coming out with separate play and pause buttons.

The camera industry needs to take a hint from the other truly innovative companies out there. Simplify, more buttons does not mean easier to use. And please stop asking the consumer what they want, they don’t know! Take some chances and innovate, give us products that we didn’t know we needed until you made them.