WWDC Last Day

I can hardly believe that it's over, I was so fully into the non-stop session-lab-sesson-mad scramble routine that I think I'm going to have a really hard time tomorrow on my own trying to wind down and entertain myself.

Today's sessions were good. The O'Reilly brown bag lunch session was a talk by Michael Johnson of Pixar, he's the person who designs and builds the software they use in-house to do production. (all on macs, of course) he had some very important things to say about the software process and how it relates to the film production process. Specifically he pointed to the fact that every morning the art people gather in a room and go over what they did the day before and absolutely tear it apart, look for every little flaw and be merciless in their critiques. But then each person takes that criticism and incorporates it, and it becomes part of the rhythm of how you work. And needles to say it results in better quality work when you know to look for those flaws yourself and you become less attached to something becasuse it's only a day's work and not the product of 5 weeks of work before someone else actually sees what you did.

His motto was "fail early and fail often", something I've tried to articulate for quite a while. (It's a play on Eric Raymond's mantra for open source developers, "release early, release often") You have to get used to the fact that you are not building tools for yourself, you're building them for the artists who will make use of them. A violin maker has to defer to the violinist when the violinist gives criticism. That's the position software developers are in as well.

The program he showed that he made was called 'Pitch Doctor', what it does is it puts the storyboard drawings to a timeline and lets you associate an audio track with it. They said that as big a part of the story pitch as the drawings was the story guy acting out the dialog and gesturing and making up sound effects. So they use pitch doctor to preserve this. Johnson said that totally unbeknownst to him the final battle sequence of The Incredibles was crafted totally using Pitch Doctor.

The second version of Pitch Doctor also lets them incorporate clips from the film at various stages of completeness to build up the transition between storyboard and animation. All of this leverages QuickTime and Cocoa frameworks to get a lot of really advanced file and media handling with very little programming legwork, such that only he and one other guy were able to make Pitch Doctor.

The other talks I saw today were an in-depth session on the internals of the JVM, an introduction to Eclipse and an advanced session on Cocoa views, nothing too exciting if you're not a mac programmer. The other thing that I did was that I had a really long and interesting talk with a couple of the Apple accessibility engineers and the accessibility lead, telling themj about things they are doing wrong, demonstrating a couple of techniques that I just spent a couple of hours yesterday working on in code that could help improve OS X's zoom function. I intend to be a complete pain in the ass on the bug reporting front now that I know that Apple really does listen and pay attention to these bug reports. I managed to get the Firefox developers to get a lot of things right before 1.0 by being beligerant about certain usability bugs, so now Apple can be on the receiving end for a change.

It was really great talking to an Apple engineer about usability and human interface, realizing that of all the people in the world to talk to about usability this is the guy who really knows his stuff and who's job is to put it to use. And he seemed really interested in the stuff I was showing and the things I had to say. I went away from there smiling, to be sure.

But now I'm sitting in my hotel room with a bag of ice on my foot, which hurts like a bastard from running around in shoes all week, downloading enough podcasts and ripping as many of Eric's Grateful Dead boots as I can onto my new iPod Shuffle to last me through a day of inactivity and a 10 hour plane ride tomorrow. I think I'll really benefit from the wind-down time if I let myself relax a bit.

Maybe I'll find a nice quiet park somewhere here in SF and just people watch and drink coffee and listen to music for the day. Sounds like a plan to me.