Michael Jurewitz also recently tweeted, “Hey #wwdc attendees: Bring your development iPad/iPhone and provision it with your MacBook/MacBook Pro. This cannot be emphasized enough.”

The small additions or reinforcements to the consensus I’d make are few, but they helped me a great deal last year.

SubEthaEdit. Worth repeating. Note-taking was actually fun and other contributors could fix / explain any errors you may have made. (There’s usually one or two folks just trying to capture as much info in as possible, and the rest clean up.) A few times, someone would ask a question in the notes, and another participant would chime in helpfully as a little backchannel. Even if you’re not familiar with the particular APIs, or even programming in general, you can earn your copy of the notes by helping with formatting and other bits. Invaluable.

Be cool about power. Bring that long extension cord for your MB*’s power brick. Outlets are a scarce resource, and you don’t want to be the guy taking up three plugs with your shiny white wall wart. You’ll also be in range of more power strips. Note that the layout and availability of power strips may change from time to time.

Say hi to and thank the presenters. They’ve put a lot of work into making WWDC a great experience for us. Since we’re all very polite and considerate people, I’m sure we’ll all do our best to show them love when given the chance, but remember put a little extra effort into doing so at the end of a session that hit the little red “turbo” button on your brain.

Prep to go wired at times. Imagine that Apple releases some software during the event. Let’s say … development software. Maybe it’s a beta and you will not want anything in the way of trying out the new hotness with everyone else.

These packages can be fairly large and would make the WiFi network cry plaintively in the corner. My memory is too hazy to recall if these downloads were blocked over the air last year; but be prepared for that kind of situation. I’ll likely be toting an Air and will be double-plus sure I’ve got my USB Ethernet adapter. (That Apple has mentioned this as well is a compelling argument on its own.)

Lunch and munch with randoms. Maybe you have a posse rivalling Gruber’s or the legions surrounding The Palmed One™. Probably not. You, too, can be awash in exuberant developers, even if you’re starting from scratch. (Hot tub not required.) Just about everyone will be cool, and this is probably the best chance of the year to have your mind blown by a brilliant new friend. Try not to use up all of those opportunities by working quietly in the corner unless you really really prefer to chill that way.

Hydrate and medicate. Water, amigos, water. Wash yer mitts. Vitamins. Electrolytes. Get some sleep. Your brain and your body will be taking a substantial toll over the week and you don’t want to peak too early. Sugar bombs all week long probably won’t help you much … but personally, I can’t resist the brownies.

See you at WWDC – and introduce yourself if you spot me running around. I usually wear a tan LaRue Tactical ball cap and will be smoking too much between sessions.

Details about Tallies are available here, or you can go right to the App Store. It’s $2.99.

On the surface, it’s a fairly simple app that, surprisingly, lets you keep running tallies of pretty much whatever you want. There have been a number of similar apps in the wild for a while, but they were all missing a critical ingredient: history.

What I really wanted to be able to do with these apps was to not only know the current total for a tally, but I also wanted to know when it had changed, and by how much. I also wanted to be able to start a tally over, but not throw away the old information. For example, I wanted to keep track of my various medications – how much I’d taken so far that day, and at what times I’d taken them – on a day-to-day basis and compare one day’s results with another’s.

I figured I couldn’t be alone, so, well, now there’s an app for that. Customer feedback has already been absolutely fantastic, and I’m looking forward to the next releases!

Big thanks to all of you who have used Tallies. Please don’t be shy about sharing your thoughts. I don’t think it’s possible to write great software without great user feedback, so any ideas you have would be a great help.

Cheers,

Bill

Development Notes:

Early on, I made the decision to go with a SQLite database rather than just a bunch of plists. This added quite a bit to the development time, but I think it’ll be worth it in the end. I have a lot of ideas about how to evolve the history features of Tallies, and the database should make that go a little easier. Plus, hey, it was good experience.

I’m sure a few folks would look at the development time involved and wonder how a counter app isn’t just busted out over a weekend. The answer, my friends, is iteration. The release version of Tallies is probably the fourth iteration of the app! This may be a holdover from my time as a web developer, but I’m a big believer in rapid iteration, and I applied that approach to Tallies. It’s assuredly cost me sales (it would have been nice to release months ago!) but I traded that for a much higher-quality release and learning some great stuff.

tigerbears.com is rising from the dead! Is it the Solanum virus? Did an asteroid pass too close to Earth? Are we in the Matrix with George Romero and Max Brooks at the helm?

No. But after working on Tallies for iPhone (and iPod Touch, natch) for the last several months, and with its imminent release, I wanted to update things here. I also have a few things to share about that development experience that I hope will be helpful to other developers.

I’ve taken the opportunity to update the About page. Just to save you a click, here’s the contents:

After a brief burst of activity in 2007, this blog fell into disuse. “There are many like it, but this one is mine.” 

Once upon a time, I was a primarily a front-end web developer. Javascript and Java, all day long. I spent about nine years as senior UI engineer at Netflix and quit in late 2006 to do the indie consultant thing. Unfortunately, after just a few weeks, I ran into a few medical snafus that slowed me down for over a year. (Don’t let your neck get screwed up, kids, because collecting MRIs sucks.) 

Now, nobody *really* likes the old lemons-into-lemonade spiel, but this is one case where it came true. It was a great opportunity to put things into perspective and look for a new path.

Apple provided that path by releasing the iPhone SDK in 2008. 

Not having a C or Objective-C background meant that I had some catching-up to do, but I have to say I haven’t been this excited about slinging code since my first forays into Java back in the day. (That was using the Cocoa-Java bridge, even … maybe on OSX 10.0 DR3? Later?) Learning Cocoa was something that has called to me for a long time (when it was NeXTStep, even) and I’m stoked to have finally taken the plunge.

Now that Tallies, my first public iPhone app, has been submitted to Apple, I hope to have a little more time to share some of these experiences. *cough*

Besides code, I’m into film, zombie fiction, and motorcycles. My bikes may be trapped in the garage for now, but your spirit never really leaves the racetrack.

Cheers,

Bill

More to the point, this is a incredibly cool technology, and the presentation is coming with a great implied mini-tutorial on a few Ruby basics. Most appreciated was the realtime code demo. Seeing the database get modified by simple commands in Firebug’s Javascript console was a real “Aha!” moment for a bunch of us who like to see things before we believe they’re easy. :)

I think Jester will work well for this game idea I have. Definitely one to research and try out.

Something else that I thought was interesting was when Pete noted that we, as developers, often “aren’t creating for people anymore.” I’ve had a few conversations like that around here in the last day or so, and it’s about time that we start taking that idea even more seriously. Fortunately, it seems like more and more of us are at least thinking about it, but I think there’s still a lot of unrealized opportunities out there.Hm. More on that when I’m not posting via iPhone. ;) Thoughts?

Mobile posting with my iPhone via Postie worked out pretty well for quick ‘n dirty stuff, though I made a few mistakes while trying to post to multiple categories. The iPhone’s camera isn’t exactly a swanky Nikon, so it took a lot of practice to time my shots to compensate for shutter lag. Not easy when your target’s only visible for a couple of seconds before your shot, and is often at a very different speed from the last time you saw them!

With the crowd at Laguna, I think the cell towers were pretty overwhelmed, at least from an data standpoint. I talked to the guys at SanDisk, who were having trouble with their broadband cards, so I wasn’t alone. I had plenty of signal, but it took a while before I could get the messages sent. Fortunately, I was able to grab a seat in the shade at the Ducati Island hospitality booth so I could geek out for a few minutes in comfort. Bonus: I can type much better while I’m sitting; walking just sends my fat fingers everywhere on that keyboard. Don’t even mention the jostling or risk of knocking over a $20,000 custom bike. OK, so I missed the fashion show, but I’ve seen bored two-bit models prance around awkwardly on a makeshift stage before. I’ve even done that myself, once, so call it professional courtesy.

One frustration was that it took the iPhone a while to decide that it couldn’t send an email, and couldn’t try to send another one while it was making that decision. After iPhone realizes it can’t send, the first outgoing message would be placed in a queue for later transmission. It’s only at that point that you can try to send your second message. It’s easy to understand why actually trying to send that second message while the first is still outbound wouldn’t work. It would be much nicer to at least be able to add that message to the outbound queue and, thus, save your work.

The messages managed to arrive at their destinations out of order, which was a little unusual. Otherwise, the process was fairly smooth, and I like that it’s simple to send a picture via email.

To get the iPhone to sync its onboard Camera Roll with iPhoto, I had to connect the iPhone while iTunes wasn’t running. (iPhoto was, but I didn’t check to see if that was a requirement.) I don’t understand the reasons for it, but that seems like a good candidate for streamlining the user experience.

Read more for a consolidation of some practice moblogging posts & pictures from the event. When I get around to putting stuff up on Flickr, I’ll add them here. Enjoy!

Colin Edwards is my hero

There he goes in that killer Laguna livery. Too bad there’s not really any Edwards swag around here; even a nice print of the livery for this race would a pretty sweet. All I could find was a hat with his old number (45) on it. Go Colin!

Marco Melandri

I think Marco is a pretty cool guy and hope he has better luck here this year. Here he is ripping off a sweet practice start in front of us between T3 and T4. I suck at starts, so I always love a demo. These new 800s sound a little different now, but the starts are still cool!

Rossi is the man

Super smooth in T3 … By the way, all these shots are from the second free practice on Friday. I’m not sure why, but Miguel Duhamel and Roger Lee Hayden were out to play too – sweet! (OK, I guess Miguel is riding for Gresini Honda with Melandri, and Roger Lee is going in as Kawasaki’s wildcard for the race. Killer.) I haven’t found out what times everyone was doing, but I’m pretty sure a few were in the 23′s … niiice!

More fun with Nicky Hayden

Nicky regulating T3 … I noticed a bunch of riders were definitely following him as much as they can. The pre-race gamesmanship at this level of riding has to be hardcore.

Anonymous Asphalt Attack

Cruising into T4 … Sorry, it’s tough to tell who this is now! (Now that I’m home … it looks like a Duc in front. Stoner? I didn’t see Capirex out there until a little later.)

Ducati Island

Free water, snacks, people, bikes … and “Pour Some Sugar On Me” just faded into “We’re Not Gonna Take It,” if you can hear it over the 600′s qualifying. I am officially in heaven. Seriously.

One of my favorite presenters from last October, Glenn Vanderburg, recently gave a talk at JAOO called The Beauty of Ruby. Since I’m coming to Ruby from a Java perspective, as he did, I was interested in seeing what excited him about the language.

I’m not going to try to reiterate all of his points, but I’d definitely recommend it to anyone else who might be feeling a little bit leery of abandoning their beloved static typing. ;) We’ve been doing it for years on the client side in Javascript, but it feels a little different to do this after so many years of Java. Glenn has a great point about this, and I’ll let him make it.

Those days were some of my favorites in my entire professional career, so I’m always excited to work with another newly-hatched organization. I love the clean slate, the opportunity, and the limited resources that demand and inspire creativity. Most of all, I love the camaraderie.

Unfortunately, we’ll probably be building it with Rails, which is only bad in that I’ll owe Pete Forde a beer. Can I write off a bad bet come tax time?

Once again, into the breach!