I waited a long time to upgrade my beloved mid 2012 11" MacBook Air, since Apple just didn't offer anything compelling with a working keyboard. Until the 2020 MacBook Air, which i just got a little while ago.

This MacBook might not have the fastest processor on the market (i got the fastest you could order), but man - this thing is plenty fast to get my work done. One thing i specifically noticed is how fast the I/O is and how important fast I/O is to my daily work. I realised this, when i wanted to clean up some code for work:

We have a strings.json file containing many strings, which we use throughout an application (localisation etc.). Each string has a "name" attribute whereby it is referenced throughout the application. I wanted to clean up the json file and delete strings, we no longer use in the application. To do this, i had to search all the source files of the application for an occurrence of a strings "name". If i'd not find an occurrence, i'd know, the string is no longer being used (and i can delete it from strings.json).

Since this is not the last and only time, i'll have to do this work, i started automating the task and wrote an AppleScript which will of course use BBedit (which never has, and still doesn't suck!) to go through a text file - which contains the "name" attributes of all of our strings, one per line - line by line and search the application source files for an occurrence of the string, recording the number of matches it found and inserting that number right at the beginning of the current line (in the text file). There were 509 source files it had to search in every go. And now look how unbelievably fast this was when i had the application source files stored on the internal SSD of the Air. Each visible update to a line of text represents having searched all 509 source files:

Isn't this crazy fast?

Trying to find out when you last logged in to your Mac i.e. because you need to find out when you started work in order to do your timesheet?

If you always shut down your mac or log out of your account, this isn't very difficult as you can e.g. just use the last-command in a terminal.

However, if you just put your Mac to sleep without even logging out, because you set it up to require a password after some inactivity time, then this is pretty hard to find out. At least it was for me.

Here's the solution i came up with:

• Open Konsole.app
• In the list of Logfiles to the left, select system.log
• In the search field on the top right of the window, type in: CGXDisplayDidWakeNotification
• Wait a second or three until you get some matching entries displayed

This method will show you a line of text with a timestamp for every time, your display woke up. If you look at the attached screenshot, i came into the office that day at 08:15 ;-)

Hopefully this'll help someone google a solution i had to come up with my myself. If you have an even better solution, let me know!

You probably read tons of stories like this already but this is mine and on this sad day, i'd like to tell it.
A tribute to SJ.

I make my living using Macs since 1988 (thanks, Steve for making this possible). I started with a Mac plus, working with PageMaker 1.0.

In 1998, i bought my first LCD display. It was a 15 inch Apple Studio Display and was a huge step forward after all the heavy 19 inch CRT displays which took a lot of room on your desk. I loved it and just had to have it.

Back then, the early adopters still had to pay a huge apple tax and if i remember right, i paid around 3.500 DM (1.700 €). Back then, the display came with a software driver you had to install and that driver was pretty buggy for me and the picture quality wasn't as good as it could be (sync issue).

This was one of the first Apple products i had ever bought which didn't work as expected and which i could not fix myself. So i turned to the official Apple support channels available to me back then. No one could help or even acknowledge the problem.

I was pretty angry, having spent a fortune on the display and various Apple gear i had purchased over the years. I searched the internet and was able to somehow find out Steve Jobs email address and in a huff, composed and sent an email to him. Sending this email already made me feel a bit better and i didn't really expect any reply at all.

About a week later, i had almost forgotten about the email, i received a phone call. It was someone from Apple Munich on the other end of the phone:

"We heard you are having a problem with your Display and i want to make sure we can solve your problems as quickly as possible"

Steve Jobs not only read my rant, written in anger, he took it seriously and made sure to make me a happy customer again, which i still am on this very sad day.

Here's to the crazy ones!

PS: i bought a second one of these displays as soon as i had the funds for it.

Unter "Deutsche Webdesigner umgehen den App Store" versucht Merlin Scholz mit äußerst fragwürdigen Mitteln und wenig Sachverstand aus nichts eine Sensation zu erschaffen.

Sein Artikel versucht die Leser glauben zu machen, dass zwei deutsche Webdesigner erstmals eine neue Technologie dazu benutzt haben, Apple's App Store zu umgehen um ihre Inhalte direkt an den Leser zu bekommen und damit Apple Sorgen machen würden.

Mit Verlaub, Herr Scholz, aber das ist Bullshit!

Kurzer Faktencheck

1. "…machen Apple Sorgen"

Gleich im Aufmacher wird behauptet, die Studenten machen Apple damit sorgen. Wodurch untermauert dieser Qualitätsjournalist diese Aussage? Damit:

Und natürlich fragt man sich, was der Pressesprecher von Apple gegen Kitesurfen und Sushi hat, dass er „Welt Online“ sagt: „Das kommentieren wir nicht.“

Was genau Herr Scholz den Pressesprecher hierzu gefragt hat, bleibt hier außen vor. Warum auch sollte Apple irgendein HTML-Magazin kommentieren? Ich behaupte mal, da fehlt Georg Albrecht (Pressesprecher Apple Deutschland) einfach die Zeit. Herr Scholz hätte also ebenso gut auch unseren Regierungssprecher fragen können, welcher ebenfalls nicht kommentiert hätte. Das hätte dann immerhin eine umso reißerische Headline hervorgebracht: "Deutsche Webdesigner machen Kanzlerin Sorgen".

2. "…umgehen App Store mit HTML5"

Die weitere Basis des Artikels ist dann die steile Theorie, dass HTML5 ein neuer Weg ist, Applikationen zu vertreiben und dabei Apple's App Store zu umgehen. Das ist faktisch einfach nicht korrekt und entspricht in etwa der Aussage "Deutsche Bauern umgehen den Sport-Einzelhandel mit Vertrieb auf Wochenmärkten".

Der App Store ist eine Plattform um native iOS Applikationen zu vertreiben. Die Plattform übernimmt hier für die Entwickler den kompletten Vertrieb, die Abrechnung und Auszahlung der Einnahmen und berechnet für die Leistungen dann eine Provision.

Das im Artikel angesprochene Magazin ist keine native Applikation, sondern mehr oder weniger nur eine Webseite, die in der Auszeichnungssprache HTML (in der Version 5) geschrieben ist. Es umgeht daher den App Store nicht. Es brauch ihn einfach nicht.

HTML war auf iOS Geräten schon immer frei und ohne jegliche Kontrolle seitens Apple zugänglich. HTML und JavaScript waren sogar ursprünglich der einzige Weg "Programme" für das iPhone zu schreiben. Lange bevor es überhaupt einen nativen SDK oder gar App Store gab. Das ist also alles nicht neu. Ich habe auch starke Zweifel, dass "Aside" die erste Web-App ist, die mit HTML5 in Deutschland entwickelt wurde (ich habe bereits seit Monaten eine eigene Lotto Web App in der Schublade).

Tatsache ist, dass man mit HTML5 und JavaScript heute Anwendungen erstellen kann, die nativen Programmen sehr nahe kommen können. Aside nutzt diese Möglichkeiten allerdings bei Weitem nicht aus, ist auf meinem iPad äußerst langsam und beschränkt sich darauf ein Icon auf dem Homescreen zu installieren. Den Unterschied zu manchen nativen Apps kann man deutlich sehen, wenn man mal das Netzwerk des iPad abschaltet, dann sieht das Aside Magazin nämlich so aus:

Ein Magazin also, das nur gelesen werden kann, wenn man online ist (also z.B. nicht im Flugzeug), was im Übrigen keine Limitierung von HTML5 ist, welches offline Daten unterstützen würde.

Fazit:
Dass Aside Apple Sorgen macht, halte ich schlicht für erfunden und was uns der Artikel als "neu" verkaufen will ist ein alter Hut. Web Apps wurden von Apple seit es das iPhone gibt aktiv unterstützt.

I've tweeted it before. I really like the iPad, but it's not a device i need. Between a MacBook Pro and an iPhone which i already have, there simply isn't much use for a device mainly made to consume.

My consuming device is the iPhone, which is where i consume my twitter-feed, rss and occasionally even hook it up to a TV to watch a movie. For this, the screen size doesn't matter at all. When screen size does matter, which is mostly when i create things, there's the MacBook Pro which might even be hooked up to a 30" Cinema Display (which will be a perfect setup once Apple fixes the flaws of the Dual Link Adapter).

So who is it for?

The iPad is the perfect device for someone which does neither have an iPhone or any personal computer at all. Like – my Mother. She's in her late seventies, learned how to type when she was young but never used the internet. She's alone and i bet an iPad would help her kill some time by communicating with friends and relatives, browse the news on the web and maybe connect with like-minded.

Deal breaker

As many of you probably know from experience, the first line of support for a mother is not AppleCare, it is FamilyCare, which would be me. And that is the deal breaker. At least as it currently seems. There is no screen sharing for iPad yet.

So how would i be able to support my mother and quickly show her how to address an email again or where to go in order to make that type display larger so she can read it? I wouldn't and that, i believe, is a big omission from Apple for an audience which seems to be the perfect target for an iPad.

So here's hoping that Apple will quickly come up with some kind of back to my iPad. As there's no daemonizing for 3rd party apps, the chances are slim that someone like TeamViewer can fill this gap any time soon.

Recently i had noticed my system.log being flooded by messages from mDNSResponder which is Bonjour (or Zero Config and formerly Rendezvous).

I had tons of messages like the following flood my system.log every 10 seconds:

04.03.10 12:56:16	mDNSResponder[18]	Bad service type in ._MacOSXDupSuppress._tcp.local. Application protocol name must be underscore plus 1-14 characters. See <http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html>
04.03.10 12:56:26	mDNSResponder[18]	Bad service type in ._MacOSXDupSuppress._tcp.local. Application protocol name must be underscore plus 1-14 characters. See <http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html>
04.03.10 12:56:36	mDNSResponder[18]	Bad service type in ._MacOSXDupSuppress._tcp.local. Application protocol name must be underscore plus 1-14 characters. See <http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html>
04.03.10 12:56:46	mDNSResponder[18]	Bad service type in ._MacOSXDupSuppress._tcp.local. Application protocol name must be underscore plus 1-14 characters. See <http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html>

The cause of the logs seem to be an older Mac OS X Server 10.3.9 box announcing a bonjour service which has a name longer than 14 characters. Short of being able to fix the cause, i was looking for a way to exclude such messages from being logged at all.

Syslogd and Filters

After a lot of googling, i discovered that on Mac OS X, syslogd not only uses /etc/syslogd.conf – as you probably knew – but also uses /etc/asl.com which offers some nice ways of configuring exactly what you want to be logged (see: man asl.conf and man asl). You can filter by log-lever, sender and even the specific contents of a message which is being logged.

Filtering by Sender

I my case, the sender of the log messages was mDNSResponder. So if i wanted to exclude anything from mDNSResponder is trying to log, i could add the following line to /etc/asl.conf:

? [= Sender mDNSResponder] ignore

After you made any changes to asl.conf, you need to restart syslogd to read the changed configuration. Syslogd is restarted with: sudo killall -HUP syslogd

Filtering by Message content

Filtering by Message content is equally trivial. In my case, the annoying message being constantly logged was Bad service type in ._MacOSXDupSuppress._tcp.local. Application protocol name must be underscore plus 1-14 characters. See <http://www.dns-sd.org/ServiceTypes.html>
You could just filter by message content, but to be save, i filter on both, sender and message content. Thank god, asl not only lets me filter by Message content but also by substring like so:

? [= Sender mDNSResponder] [S= Message Bad service type in ._MacOSXDupSuppress] ignore

Again, don't forget to restart syslogd after a change to asl.conf!

As it took me rather long googling a solution to my problem, i hope this post is being indexed nicely and will help others with a similar problem!

Update 2010-03-04 17:48 CET

It seems the above only really affects logging to the asl datastore. Messages filtered like above are not being displayed anymore if you use console.app and select ":All Messages" but unfortunately will still be written to /var/log/system.log.
Too bad.

Dear Steve,

you are absolultely right, that most of the current Camcorders went USB instead of FireWire.

But you know what? I don't upgrade my Camcorder (a trusty old Sony DCR-PC2E) every so often because it just works and i need the money to buy new Apple Laptops every other year.

Regards,
Stefan

So there you have it. An iPhone sans phone. iPod touch. Surely nice it is, with WiFi and all, but why it is not offered with a 160GB HardDisk (size or energy constraints?) and Bluetooth so you can surf the web and write emails on the couch comfortably using a keyboard, is bejond me.

Wouldn't this be a natural fit? Why would i trade in my 40GB generation X iPod for a 16GB touchpod and loose half of my multimedia library?

So here's hoping for iPod touch 1.1 with harddisk, bluetooth and reduced price ;-)

PS: watching the Stevenote, it makes me really, really sad to watch grown up people (older than 40) freak out over a ringtones feature. What has the world come to?

Because we have outages nearly every day and sometimes twice a day - according to the .mac system status:

2/10/2007
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.

2/8/2007
.Mac members were unable to access any services. Duration: 1.5 hours. Some .Mac members were unable to access mail on the web. Duration: 1.5 hours. Normal services have been restored.

2/5/2007
1% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours. Normal service has been restored.

2/5/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.

2/4/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour. Normal service has been restored.

2/4/07
Due to scheduled maintenance, some members might not have been able to access .Mac Mail for 20 minutes or less between 10pm PST on 2/3/07 and 1am PST on 2/4/07.

1/22/2007
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 3.5 hours. Normal service has been restored.

1/21/2007
4% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 30 minutes. Normal service has been restored.

1/16/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 10 hours. Normal service has been restored.

1/15/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 45 minutes.

1/11/2007
2% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 2 hours.

1/10/2007
3% of members experienced difficulties with .Mac Mail for 1 hour.

Here's my little christmas gift to all of you having either Saft or any SIMBL PlugIns installed and want to work with the WebKit nightly bulilds without crashing or having to manually disable the above mentioned PlugIns:

OpenWebKit

is a simple AppleScript App, that just does the following:

• Rename /Library/InputManagers to /Library/xInputManagers
• Start /Applications/WebKit (the nightly build you have installed)
• Rename /Library/xInputManagers back to /Library/InputManagers

Installation notes:
Download, unpack and doubleclick.

Note: as this script needs to rename a folder in /Library, it will only work when you have Admin rights for your Mac!

Tada! No more hassle.

Enjoy!

PS: i wonder why the nightlies do not just already disable all input managers so we don't have to.

My Mighty Mouse recently arrived and i must say. Very well done. The nipple works perfectly fine - much better than traditional scroll wheels which tend to give you carpal tunnel and such. It is actualy a moving part, not just a sensor. The mouse also has a "real" mechanical click like the previous one. The sensors sense if you intended a right or left click.

Only the side buttons are not perfect for me if i am in nipple mode. Because when my hand is in the scroll position on the nipple, my thumb is way to far back on the mouse to reach the left side button. Apple should have made the side buttons wider (almost double the width). Also IMHO one needs to press too hard onthe side buttons to actualy make them do anything.

Minor grief also with the scrolling speed. Prior to installing the Mighty Mouse Drivers, i could adjust scrolling to a decent speed of my liking. After installing the driver, it got a little slower. Especially horizontal scrolling could be faster.

Even with the normal mouse (is that tiny mouse now), i would have always preferred to adjust the mouse (pointer) speed bejond the limit the OS offered me. Same now with the scrolling speed.

And now for some glitches with the current Apple Driver for the Mighty Mouse:

It doesn't care (or cares too much) about context. Imageine you're looking at a webpage which includes a TEXT AREA with scrolling content. When you move your mouse pointer over the Text Area, the nipple will scroll the text area which is fine - but once you reach the top or bottom of that textarea, the whole webpage suddelny starts scrolling. This is a major usability issue as it makes scrolling to the top or bottom of a text area nearly impossible. IMHO, reaching the top or bottom of a text area should just stop the scrolling - scrolling should NOT continue bejond the boundaries of the text ara. See the movie below for an explanation.

Another weird thing is related to quicktime content. Try loading an MP3 file embeded via the QuickTime Plugin into a Webpage for example (any podcast should do) and move the mouse pointer over the QuickTime Controller displayed in the Browser (I tried with Safari). Now scroll right/left. Here what happens to the volume? But the left/right scroll doesn't actualy change the controllers volume but rather the volume you could adjust via the movie properties in quicktime pro - which could lead to terrible distortion.

Tags: mighty mouse

So we recently attended yet another "Sommerfest" organised by WEKA Verlag (we're placing ADs in their magazines) in Munich and since Munich is a 2 and a half hour drive from where we live, we decided to stay a day longer and have some fun. After having a Weißwurst Breakfast at the Viktualienmarkt, we attended a georgeous exhibition in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. It was the Frei Otto exhibition - you know - the Guy who developed the funny tent like roofs for the 1972 Olympics in Munich.
Besides all the fascinating Frei Otto concepts you could see, i was blown away by - what i discovered on second sight - were various multimedia shows running off some Mac Minis hanging on a wall including Apple Cinema Displays and all... Nice use of a Mini heh?

Excuse the quality of the images, but they were taken with a Nokia 6630 Cellphone.

Daring Fireball: Bombs Away

I've seen some interpret this as petulance or spite -- that this switch is just Jobs picking up his ball and leaving for another playground because he feels IBM has embarrassed him. That interpretation is foolish. I really think Jobs was just being honest, or at least as honest as he could be in a public statement.

Now i think if he would have realy been honest, then whole thing would have been rephrazed from "We're switching to Intel" to "We're now adding Intel to our Processor Portfolio". This would have left all doors wide open and with the universal binary, we'd all have the choice to use whatever processor we'd want.

Seeing that this didn't happen, leaves a sour taste of his Steveness once more being pissed off by someone and being stubborn and walking away in a huff.

Is Apple suddenly believing the Megahertz Myth themselves or what? I mean - i consider myself a "Poweruser" - i am using a dual 1.8Ghz G5 in the Office and i tell you, this thing is fast enough for all my tasks. I would even go so far to say it will be fast enough for 90% of the Mac users out there. And this 1.8Ghz G5 isn't available anymore anyway as we're now at 2.8Ghz already.

So what the fu__ is going on here? I believe as long as IBM can supply sufficient numbers of processors, we're just fine. We don't necessarily need no stinking 4Ghz or such. So is Apple just out for World domination by trying to get OS X onto every X86 out there. That would be a real silly idea. Or do i just not get it?

See also: this

Here's a little help for all of you who fail to install tiger due to a corrupted disk - aka when diskutility reports it can't fix a broken disk.

Boot into singleuser mode by pressing APPLE-S when you turn your machine on.
When the System comes up with a textprompt, type:
fsck -fy
and hit enter.

You'll now get some output about errors fsck will find and apperantly try to repair (which it proved it can't in diskutility run by the Tiger installer already).
In the output, you'll notice it will print some numbers to identify bad files - something like:
Fixing bad file (1234567D)...

Write down all of these numbers (excluding any trailing LETTER - we only need the plain number - no A-Z).

Now type:
reboot (and hit enter)
to reboot into the OS already installe don your Harddisk.

By knowing these secret numbers reported by fsck, we can now find the actual files which cause the problems. After finding the files, i recommend to copy them to some external disk or a server as we are going to delete all of them!

To find those files, open Terminal.app again and type:
sudo find / -inum NNNNNN
where NNNNNN needs to be replaced by one of the secret numbers you wrote down previously.
The find comand will search for a while and finally output the real path and filename of the bad file. With this information, you can easily locate and delete the file from the finder.
Repeat the above "find / -inum NNNNNN" thing for as many of the secret numbers you had written down and delete all of the files "find" will find.

Now, you can boot into singleuser mode again (APPLE-S) run fsck -fy and it will fix your drive. Run fsck twice and when it is done type:
sync
type:
reboot
hold the "C" key to boot into your Tiger install DVD (in case it is still inserted) and you should be on your way to tiger.

Now if you mess up your machine, don't blame me!

[The above steps are not written for Geeks so i didn't combine the find and delete steps like a geek would have done ;-)]

Daring Fireball: The Tiger Details List: "I’ve been using the final developer build of Mac OS X 10.4 for the past few weeks, and I’m compiling a list of observations and interesting details. Things that are new, things that are different."

And here's what i found during the first hours of using Tiger:

Installation:

You need lots of available Space. I ran a little short on the harddisk of my 12" and sure enough, the installation stopped with an error. If i wouldn't have been as knowledgable as i am, i would have lost my previous USER-Data as i did an archive install.

• Updating the Current System
  
• Archive Install which does a clean install but can preserve your user-settings and such but archives the Old System in a folder called "Previous System". Allthough this prev. System can not be used anymore (as written inthe installer help), it is archived and wastes space
• Super Clean install which formats your Harddisk and cleanly installs the new OS.

I had just used the "Update prev. System" for the last couple of updates. My gut tells me however that a clean install will always result in a more stable system, so this time i picked the Archive Install to have a clean install but still keep my user settings. Now if you don't have huge harddisks or have the habbit of always filling them up, this Archive Install requires far too much harddisk space, as it needs to fit the NEW OS and the OLD OS on the same harddisk (you can't archive the old OS on another drive). Now i didn't have enough space available.

This gives the desire for a new INSTALLER option which either lets me archive the previous system to an external HD (not many people will be able to use this archived old system anyway) or even offers me to just OVERWRITE the old system and only keep my User-Settings (old home folder...) which would be my preferred way. This way, we save a couple of GIGs which is otherwise wasted by the archived and useles old System.

Spotlight:

I love spotlight and was really waiting for such a feature to finaly be available in a usable manner. It works pretty well but here's one minor glitch i wonder if this couldn't be a little bit more cleverly aproached.

It seems spotlight doesn't INDEX any of your iPhoto Libraries Metadata which i find strange. For example i have tons of photos taken on my various trips to Bali, Indonesia. The images of course have these weired filenames like "DSC00133.jpg" which doesn't mean much for indexing. However, all these images are nicely filed into an iPhoto Album called "Bali" and lot's of them even have keywords assigned. This means i had already taken the time to add META DATA to all the images. Sadly this META DATA is simply ignored by Spotlight as NONE of my Bali-Images is found when i search for BALI in spotlight. Some room for improvement.

So today is Keynote day again! This is usually the day when we religious like mac fans attach our eyes to the screens and worship our Macximo Leader, his highness Steve, talk to us.
This year it's gonna be different. In the past, we were all equal - wether we were fortunate enough to be live at the show or back home behind our DSL lines, as apple was broadcasting the event live into the internet. This seemed so important to Apple, that they even started live broadcasts of WWDC-Keynotes - which used to be a closed event only accessible to participants having signed an NDA - to the public.

This year however, Apple was so upset about some information leaked to the public before the event, that it reacted like a 6 year old and left in a huff.

Now i ask you, how can a company like Apple react so silly? Why do we, the users, the followers, the crazy ones, the ones who change the world have to pay the price for something bad some roumor site may have done?

We are the ones buying the products, being fanatically loyal. What if we'd react childish and would say: "No Apple, you've been mean to us, we're not gonna play with you anymore"?

Now if Apple would have said: "Due to smaller budgets, we are unable to present a live feed of the Macworld Keynote anymore" or alike, i would not even dare to think about it, but looking at the current situation about the "missing live-stream" just smells terribly cheesy.

Apple: grow up please and give us our Keynotes back! I mean live Keynotes! The ones which are so essential to our über-culture, that you even named a software package after them.

Google Keywords: Macworld 2005 keynote live stream, 2005 keynote broadcast, steve jobs, quicktime streaming

I mean - come on - what would happen to AAPL if anything other than the above letter would have been published.
So here's hoping that Steve gets better soon and that his illness was food for thought about how to continue the corporation we all love so much - and care about - without him.

Some think Jonathan Ive would be the man for the Job. I don't know. It would be hard to find someone - not just to fill the Keynote Sessions - but also to have the necessary vision. Let's just hope the best for now...

Boing Boing: Xcode .torrent

BoingBoing just posted a link to a .torrent download of Xcode, stating Apple's distribution network is "slow and poky".

Now i'll have to ask: How is Akamai slow and poky? And if the download is not distributed via Akamai, but only via the ADC site, aren't you violating the NDA you signed to get access to the ADC site to pull XCode and put it on .torrent?

Just curious.

Funny enough just shortly after the show was over, there was this huge X over SFO. Can you spot it?

It's been once again a fun and exhausting week here at Apple's WWDC 2004. The reality distortion field seemed even stronger than usual. Lot's of marketing-driven presentations. We really shouldn't have to listen to company profiles during such an event -- hint, hint! Me mainly taking the Enterprise track would have preferred much more "real world" examples rather than have the speakers repeat the marketing mantras over and over again (myth vs. reality). Can't go into details due to the NDA most of us had signed.
Maybe the quality decreased a bit due to the large number of attendees?
Also i missed the espresso-carts very, very much. I'll post some photos to my gallery soon.

Sure it was nice of Steve to give an iSight to each of us. Damn nice piece of hardware for sure. Much appreciated!

However, calling iChatAV "revolutionary" as lots of us Mac aficionados do, is - well - biased.

Being the first WWDC with an "Enterprise" track, here's what an "Enterprise" user like me feels is missing from iChatAV:

• NetMeeting compatibility since this would also make it compatible with our professional video-conferencing system.
• One To Many Conferences, since most of the time, a conference is really involving more than 2 persons.
• Integrated whiteboard and screensharing in order to show others presentations and such.

Now all this isn't new and even exists on the Mac Today (more or less mature). For instance there is a promising looking video-conf App, which indeed is NetMeeting compatible, called ohphoneX.

Even a real interactive conferencing app incl. whiteboard and such is there. Never heard about it before i met the Developers on one of the couches at WWDC: Marratech.

To sum up: iChatAV is a nice start and i enjoy being able to chat with my Girlfriend here in Germany while attending WWDCs, but there's potential for much, much more...