I am PJ Gray, the senior iOS engineer here at EverTrue. Last week I went to Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference in San Francisco for the first time. Usually I am just huddled around my monitor watching live feeds from MacRumors.com. Not this year!
I woke up around 4am to get in line with a bunch of other equally crazy Apple fan boys. While waiting in the keynote line, I met several awesome people. It is really an amazing experience to be surrounded by people that are just as insane about Apple as you are. We eventually busted out my laptop and started fixing bugs in one of my apps, right there in line! At one point I had 3 people back seat coding over my shoulder. “You should really try rasterizing the backing layer of your custom UITableViewCell”, was suggested more than once.
When we finally got close to the doors, we rode the first set of escalators up, and it was like we were entering Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. After all, WWDC did sell out in under 2 hours, so we all DID have golden tickets. Then we just got hustled upstairs, where we had to wait in another hallway. There were coffee and snacks though!
Finally, they let us through….to another escalator, and another line!
Once we squeezed through onto the escalator, we were led into the main conference hall, where the keynote would take place. Finally seated! Now this year I am not watching the live feed of the keynote on MacRumors.com, I am looking at the back of the MacRumors.com guys head. Woohoo!
All in all, it was a fantastic keynote. A new MacBook Pro (with high resolution Retina Display), new OSX operating system, new iOS operating system, and tons of nerdy features for developers like me. Stay tuned to EverTrue as I implement these amazing new features in our suite of applications!