Stefan Arentz

I did not have a change to attend the WWDC this year so I was excited when I read that Apple was organizing ‘Leopard Tech Days’ around the world. Including in my home town, Amsterdam!

It was organized at the Hilton and they took good care of us. Nice breakfast buffet, nice lunch. Hilton Amsterdam style: herring sandwiches.

A lot of people were there. Probably more than a hundred. It shows OS X is very much alive here.

The sessions were very disappointing though. An Apple employee was doing the presentations. I think he was either the the UK or Ireland. He was just not very good at doing presentations and mostly unprepared. He for example demoed some new features of Leopard using his personal account on his MacBook instead of using a well prepared demo account.

The first session, Mac OS X “Leopard” Development Overview - Spotlight & Quicklook, could have been a session given in an Apple Store for end-users. It was a walk-through of new Leopard features like Spotlight, Time Machine and QuickLook. With screenshots from an old beta! The presenter skipped through all the juicy bits that would interest the crowd of programmers. I don’t understand why he did that. Leopard has been out for a month and I’m sure nobody in tha crowd was waiting for a product presentation.

The second session, Introducing Core Animation, kind of went the same. Not very well prepared and not getting into the right technical details. The slides were also old, showing deprecated API calls that have been renamed in the final Leopard release. Why not fix that? And then there was the mistake of letting people ask questions during the presentation. That took a LOT of time.

Fortunately the same sessions are available on ADC TV (through the Leopard Dev Center) and you will get much more out that those.

I skipped the remaining sessions and left after lunch. I love herring.