Last week, the Internet was abuzz with talk about a single tweet which caused quite a stir. The head of a PR firm tweeted: “#AlwaysBetOnDuke too many went too far with their reviews…we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom.” Working hand in hand with PR firms is something we at AppStorm have to do pretty much every day, but it’s not often we’ve seen one of them speak out like this.

Because of that issue, it got me thinking about how we do our reviews here at AppStorm, and it made me wonder if some of our readers think we might have a bias towards the positive side of things, and therefore, we don’t give “real” reviews. So to address that issue, I figured I’d peel back the curtain a bit and talk about how we at AppStorm review an app, and what that means for you, the reader.

The Input

We get lots of submissions at AppStorm, mostly from PR firms and developers who want to get the word out about their product. There’s a few different ways we take in the stream: There’s our Quick Look feature, email, and Twitter is another popular option. When we get these submissions, I’ll typically mark down the name on a spreadsheet I keep, and put it under a “potential review” section. We won’t review all of these apps (there’s just not enough time, frankly), but this way if a writer is looking for an assignment, we have something in the bank.

The Actual Review Process

As the editor, it’s my job to make sure that each writer is on task and writing about an app that either they’ve chosen themselves or that I’ve sent their way. To make it fair and accurate, I want them to use the app for a few days and get the feel of it. Sometimes, an app looks great on day one, but by day five, it’s delegated to the “Unused Apps” folder on their iPhone. This gives us the most fair and unbiased opinion on each app.

If the app works, then the writer puts up a review, with a rating at the bottom that designates how good the app is on a 1-10 scale. Typically, our reviews are between six to ten points, with most of them being in the eights, nines and tens. So why not anything below a six?

Peering Behind the Curtain

I bought an app the other day, with really high hopes for it. I expected it to replace two or three of my other go-to apps, and I figured that it was absolutely perfect to my workflow. Back then (before I was editor), I emailed the boss and called dibs on the review. He slotted me in, and I started playing with the app. As disappointment crept in, I realized that this app wasn’t going to be a 6 or above, so I told the editor as such. The response? “Fine with me, let’s just skip it and move on to the next one.”

We like to keep things positive here on the site, so we’re not going to publish scathing reviews that tear each developer up with each word — we’re just not that site. What we want to do is collect the best apps that you can get, and put them out for our readers to find. It’s those diamonds in the rough or hidden gems that we want to showcase alongside the big names, because we don’t want you to clutter up your iPhone with junk the way we do. The App Store is a pretty big place, so we like to think we’re helping you narrow down the process.

What We Don’t Review

Which, at the end of this all, means that we often review more apps than we actually publish. I know that between all of the AppStorm sites that I write for,  I personally turned down at least four last month because they just weren’t good enough. I spent hours of my time trying to determine if the applications were worth our reader’s time, and in the end, they weren’t. So instead of writing something fake just to get paid, I opted instead to move on to something else, that way the quality of the site was kept up.

And now, as editor, that’s something I continue to push. If one of our writers doesn’t like an app, don’t review it. For me, I find the best type of review is written by someone who uses — and hopefully loves — the program. For example, I’m a huge fan of Instapaper for the iPad. I use it every day — usually multiple times a day — and I really think it’s not only helped my productivity, but also the way I consume websites. As such, I wrote a review about it for our sister site iPad.AppStorm.net, and gave it a 10 out of 10. You may not agree with the score, but at least you know that I have a strong opinion about it, which means that at least one person out there thinks it’s worth the money. Why not listen to someone who’s passionate about the program, instead of hunting and pecking in the App Store to find something that just works OK?

The Results

Because of that, we won’t get into an argument on the web with a PR firm the way other sites will. If a PR company pushes a product our direction and we don’t like it, then it’s just not going to get reviewed. That way, the PR company doesn’t get a negative hit on the product, and our readers don’t waste their time reading a review on a less-than-stellar app. It’s win-win in our book.

This isn’t how most businesses run review sites, and we understand that it’s not for everyone. But this system works out pretty well over here, and I think it keeps a positive spin on things. And frankly, if you’re here reading this now, chances are pretty good you agree.

Since the powerful iOS 4 developer library was introduced, many fantastic app ideas have come to fruition. In the social networking realm we’ve seen Facebook and Twitter exploding into the mobile market. Previously, we had looked into popular check-in services using the powerful GPS feature within every iPhone and iPod touch.

The release of With by Path, Inc has shown some tremendous popularity. It’s a check-in service similar to Gowalla or Foursquare where you not only update your status but include @replies to who you’re currently with. It’s a stroke of genius and promotes a fantastic system for meeting new people in your area. If you’re looking to get started using With, hit the jump to find out more.

Getting Logged In

You can download With app free from the app store and get going right away. Once you’ve launched you’re greeted with a heartwarming “Welcome!” display bubble. This provides some information about the app along with a Twitter Connect button. From what I can tell the app’s website doesn’t offer any type of signup process. For the time being, it seems like you’re only able to create and edit your profile from the mobile app itself.

Moving forward, the Sign In screen is fairly straightforward. The process allows you to sign up for a Twitter account if you do not already have one, or simply input your account details and connect. You’ll be asked to provide an email to complete the process as well. Additionally, your Twitter avatar will be imported into your With account — pretty convenient!

You’ll notice many of the most active user profiles include a custom avatar. This is a powerful way to distinguish yourself amongst the crowd. If you have friends on Twitter, you are able to invite them into With, assuming they can download the app. However, the best way to start meeting people is to dig through suggested users and search out your favorite Twitter accounts.

The Home Screen

One of the nicest features is live streaming updates on your home page. Once you’ve launched With, the app will auto-refresh and update with the latest check-ins. You’ll see each individual user and avatar as they’re included from another With account, or similarly a Twitter account.

In unison with the other popular check-in apps, With gives you the option to snap a picture and tie it into your update — as if check-in services weren’t storing enough information! These are displayed as semi-transparent backgrounds in each user’s live stream. Although this step is optional, it provides a layer of trust and will get your profile seen by more users.

But the biggest way to gain attention and meet people is to be active. This means consistently checking-in with others, whenever possible; Going out to eat, bowling, movies, whatever the occasion may entail. If your friends are using Twitter, you can include their account inside your With check-in, even if they don’t have a profile.

Tracking Down Followers

Try checking the bottom left-hand corner of the app window and you’ll notice a square holding your current avatar. Touch this to bring up your user profile page, complete with Twitter bio and URL fully imported.

You can check up on those you follow and how many people are following you. This is the main concept of With — connecting between many social networks and sharing updates with those around you. If you happened to follow anybody earlier in the signup process you can now access that list under Following in the lower left corner. From here, you may unfollow anybody you wish, or also access their profile pages.

Other profile layouts are basically similar to yours, displaying current followers and bio. From these screens it’s a lot easier to find people you’ve never met who are working in the same industry, or possibly those who enjoy similar hobbies. If you have friends already using the network it’s really simple to find people through their profile as well.

If you go back to the app home screen you’ll notice a search button located in the bottom-right. This will bring you back to the search page where the signup process initially dumped you off. If searching Twitter isn’t yielding results, attempt a keyword search. This includes full names and usernames among the many With profiles.

Build Your With Network

Remember that With works like Twitter, so it’s important to follow users you’re interested in. No doubt, it’s a great way to add some action into your live stream and also get your profile noticed. Many users are joining With each day, and the network is growing rapidly.

As you begin to follow many users, it’s only natural that followers will find your profile as well. If you are updating frequently and active in the app, chances are good folks will begin to recognize your profile. Surely there are plenty of great people to meet via the mobile web, and With provides yet another unconventional way.

Another handy feature is that the check-in process will actually notify your Twitter account to any users you are checking into using With. Once you post an update, it’s sent live to Twitter and includes a personal with.me check-in link. We’ve also seen this behavior on Foursquare and Gowalla. With performs all of these tasks so elegantly and requires barely any setup time, it’s truly a wonderful experience. Since the network is also public, it’s easy to include Twitter users and recruit them to With, just from a single update.

Conclusion

The process of meeting people on With is simplified a great deal. If you’re already a Twitter user, then you’ll probably end up with followers by just registering an account. The system is quite elegant with recognizing users and following your friends automatically. But even if some people are skipped over, the search functionality will be able to pick them up lightning fast.

User interface and design patterns are also stunning. Topping off what is one powerful and addictive social networking app, I highly recommend playing around and joining With. It’s a colorful community collective of bright minds and tech-savvy mobile users. And with a free price tag how can you beat the experience?

Last week, the Internet was abuzz with talk about a single tweet which caused quite a stir. The head of a PR firm tweeted: “#AlwaysBetOnDuke too many went too far with their reviews…we r reviewing who gets games next time and who doesn’t based on today’s venom.” Working hand in hand with PR firms is something we at AppStorm have to do pretty much every day, but it’s not often we’ve seen one of them speak out like this.

Because of that issue, it got me thinking about how we do our reviews here at AppStorm, and it made me wonder if some of our readers think we might have a bias towards the positive side of things, and therefore, we don’t give “real” reviews. So to address that issue, I figured I’d peel back the curtain a bit and talk about how we at AppStorm review an app, and what that means for you, the reader.

The Input

We get lots of submissions at AppStorm, mostly from PR firms and developers who want to get the word out about their product. There’s a few different ways we take in the stream: There’s our Quick Look feature, email, and Twitter is another popular option. When we get these submissions, I’ll typically mark down the name on a spreadsheet I keep, and put it under a “potential review” section. We won’t review all of these apps (there’s just not enough time, frankly), but this way if a writer is looking for an assignment, we have something in the bank.

The Actual Review Process

As the editor, it’s my job to make sure that each writer is on task and writing about an app that either they’ve chosen themselves or that I’ve sent their way. To make it fair and accurate, I want them to use the app for a few days and get the feel of it. Sometimes, an app looks great on day one, but by day five, it’s delegated to the “Unused Apps” folder on their iPhone. This gives us the most fair and unbiased opinion on each app.

If the app works, then the writer puts up a review, with a rating at the bottom that designates how good the app is on a 1-10 scale. Typically, our reviews are between six to ten points, with most of them being in the eights, nines and tens. So why not anything below a six?

Peering Behind the Curtain

I bought an app the other day, with really high hopes for it. I expected it to replace two or three of my other go-to apps, and I figured that it was absolutely perfect to my workflow. Back then (before I was editor), I emailed the boss and called dibs on the review. He slotted me in, and I started playing with the app. As disappointment crept in, I realized that this app wasn’t going to be a 6 or above, so I told the editor as such. The response? “Fine with me, let’s just skip it and move on to the next one.”

We like to keep things positive here on the site, so we’re not going to publish scathing reviews that tear each developer up with each word — we’re just not that site. What we want to do is collect the best apps that you can get, and put them out for our readers to find. It’s those diamonds in the rough or hidden gems that we want to showcase alongside the big names, because we don’t want you to clutter up your iPhone with junk the way we do. The App Store is a pretty big place, so we like to think we’re helping you narrow down the process.

What We Don’t Review

Which, at the end of this all, means that we often review more apps than we actually publish. I know that between all of the AppStorm sites that I write for,  I personally turned down at least four last month because they just weren’t good enough. I spent hours of my time trying to determine if the applications were worth our reader’s time, and in the end, they weren’t. So instead of writing something fake just to get paid, I opted instead to move on to something else, that way the quality of the site was kept up.

And now, as editor, that’s something I continue to push. If one of our writers doesn’t like an app, don’t review it. For me, I find the best type of review is written by someone who uses — and hopefully loves — the program. For example, I’m a huge fan of Instapaper for the iPad. I use it every day — usually multiple times a day — and I really think it’s not only helped my productivity, but also the way I consume websites. As such, I wrote a review about it for our sister site iPad.AppStorm.net, and gave it a 10 out of 10. You may not agree with the score, but at least you know that I have a strong opinion about it, which means that at least one person out there thinks it’s worth the money. Why not listen to someone who’s passionate about the program, instead of hunting and pecking in the App Store to find something that just works OK?

The Results

Because of that, we won’t get into an argument on the web with a PR firm the way other sites will. If a PR company pushes a product our direction and we don’t like it, then it’s just not going to get reviewed. That way, the PR company doesn’t get a negative hit on the product, and our readers don’t waste their time reading a review on a less-than-stellar app. It’s win-win in our book.

This isn’t how most businesses run review sites, and we understand that it’s not for everyone. But this system works out pretty well over here, and I think it keeps a positive spin on things. And frankly, if you’re here reading this now, chances are pretty good you agree.

Since the powerful iOS 4 developer library was introduced, many fantastic app ideas have come to fruition. In the social networking realm we’ve seen Facebook and Twitter exploding into the mobile market. Previously, we had looked into popular check-in services using the powerful GPS feature within every iPhone and iPod touch.

The release of With by Path, Inc has shown some tremendous popularity. It’s a check-in service similar to Gowalla or Foursquare where you not only update your status but include @replies to who you’re currently with. It’s a stroke of genius and promotes a fantastic system for meeting new people in your area. If you’re looking to get started using With, hit the jump to find out more.

Getting Logged In

You can download With app free from the app store and get going right away. Once you’ve launched you’re greeted with a heartwarming “Welcome!” display bubble. This provides some information about the app along with a Twitter Connect button. From what I can tell the app’s website doesn’t offer any type of signup process. For the time being, it seems like you’re only able to create and edit your profile from the mobile app itself.

Moving forward, the Sign In screen is fairly straightforward. The process allows you to sign up for a Twitter account if you do not already have one, or simply input your account details and connect. You’ll be asked to provide an email to complete the process as well. Additionally, your Twitter avatar will be imported into your With account — pretty convenient!

You’ll notice many of the most active user profiles include a custom avatar. This is a powerful way to distinguish yourself amongst the crowd. If you have friends on Twitter, you are able to invite them into With, assuming they can download the app. However, the best way to start meeting people is to dig through suggested users and search out your favorite Twitter accounts.

The Home Screen

One of the nicest features is live streaming updates on your home page. Once you’ve launched With, the app will auto-refresh and update with the latest check-ins. You’ll see each individual user and avatar as they’re included from another With account, or similarly a Twitter account.

In unison with the other popular check-in apps, With gives you the option to snap a picture and tie it into your update — as if check-in services weren’t storing enough information! These are displayed as semi-transparent backgrounds in each user’s live stream. Although this step is optional, it provides a layer of trust and will get your profile seen by more users.

But the biggest way to gain attention and meet people is to be active. This means consistently checking-in with others, whenever possible; Going out to eat, bowling, movies, whatever the occasion may entail. If your friends are using Twitter, you can include their account inside your With check-in, even if they don’t have a profile.

Tracking Down Followers

Try checking the bottom left-hand corner of the app window and you’ll notice a square holding your current avatar. Touch this to bring up your user profile page, complete with Twitter bio and URL fully imported.

You can check up on those you follow and how many people are following you. This is the main concept of With — connecting between many social networks and sharing updates with those around you. If you happened to follow anybody earlier in the signup process you can now access that list under Following in the lower left corner. From here, you may unfollow anybody you wish, or also access their profile pages.

Other profile layouts are basically similar to yours, displaying current followers and bio. From these screens it’s a lot easier to find people you’ve never met who are working in the same industry, or possibly those who enjoy similar hobbies. If you have friends already using the network it’s really simple to find people through their profile as well.

If you go back to the app home screen you’ll notice a search button located in the bottom-right. This will bring you back to the search page where the signup process initially dumped you off. If searching Twitter isn’t yielding results, attempt a keyword search. This includes full names and usernames among the many With profiles.

Build Your With Network

Remember that With works like Twitter, so it’s important to follow users you’re interested in. No doubt, it’s a great way to add some action into your live stream and also get your profile noticed. Many users are joining With each day, and the network is growing rapidly.

As you begin to follow many users, it’s only natural that followers will find your profile as well. If you are updating frequently and active in the app, chances are good folks will begin to recognize your profile. Surely there are plenty of great people to meet via the mobile web, and With provides yet another unconventional way.

Another handy feature is that the check-in process will actually notify your Twitter account to any users you are checking into using With. Once you post an update, it’s sent live to Twitter and includes a personal with.me check-in link. We’ve also seen this behavior on Foursquare and Gowalla. With performs all of these tasks so elegantly and requires barely any setup time, it’s truly a wonderful experience. Since the network is also public, it’s easy to include Twitter users and recruit them to With, just from a single update.

Conclusion

The process of meeting people on With is simplified a great deal. If you’re already a Twitter user, then you’ll probably end up with followers by just registering an account. The system is quite elegant with recognizing users and following your friends automatically. But even if some people are skipped over, the search functionality will be able to pick them up lightning fast.

User interface and design patterns are also stunning. Topping off what is one powerful and addictive social networking app, I highly recommend playing around and joining With. It’s a colorful community collective of bright minds and tech-savvy mobile users. And with a free price tag how can you beat the experience?

Well, WWDC came and went and we still don’t have a new iPhone to hold in our hands. Of course, we knew going into the event that we weren’t going to see new hardware, but now the big question is, when is it going to happen?

Right now, one of the popular theories going around is that Apple will announce it at the annual iPod event in September, and that will be the new release date from here on forward. That sounds pretty good, but we’re not positive that’s going to be the case; Apple could definitely pull a switcheroo and announce it earlier or even later if they want, that way they don’t tick off anyone who bought a Verizon iPhone 4 new earlier this year.

So we’d like to hear from you to see if there’s a general consensus among the masses. When do you think the new iPhone will be released?

Since the powerful iOS 4 developer library was introduced, many fantastic app ideas have come to fruition. In the social networking realm we’ve seen Facebook and Twitter exploding into the mobile market. Previously, we had looked into popular check-in services using the powerful GPS feature within every iPhone and iPod touch.

The release of With by Path, Inc has shown some tremendous popularity. It’s a check-in service similar to Gowalla or Foursquare where you not only update your status but include @replies to who you’re currently with. It’s a stroke of genius and promotes a fantastic system for meeting new people in your area. If you’re looking to get started using With, hit the jump to find out more.

Getting Logged In

You can download With app free from the app store and get going right away. Once you’ve launched you’re greeted with a heartwarming “Welcome!” display bubble. This provides some information about the app along with a Twitter Connect button. From what I can tell the app’s website doesn’t offer any type of signup process. For the time being, it seems like you’re only able to create and edit your profile from the mobile app itself.

Moving forward, the Sign In screen is fairly straightforward. The process allows you to sign up for a Twitter account if you do not already have one, or simply input your account details and connect. You’ll be asked to provide an email to complete the process as well. Additionally, your Twitter avatar will be imported into your With account — pretty convenient!

You’ll notice many of the most active user profiles include a custom avatar. This is a powerful way to distinguish yourself amongst the crowd. If you have friends on Twitter, you are able to invite them into With, assuming they can download the app. However, the best way to start meeting people is to dig through suggested users and search out your favorite Twitter accounts.

The Home Screen

One of the nicest features is live streaming updates on your home page. Once you’ve launched With, the app will auto-refresh and update with the latest check-ins. You’ll see each individual user and avatar as they’re included from another With account, or similarly a Twitter account.

In unison with the other popular check-in apps, With gives you the option to snap a picture and tie it into your update — as if check-in services weren’t storing enough information! These are displayed as semi-transparent backgrounds in each user’s live stream. Although this step is optional, it provides a layer of trust and will get your profile seen by more users.

But the biggest way to gain attention and meet people is to be active. This means consistently checking-in with others, whenever possible; Going out to eat, bowling, movies, whatever the occasion may entail. If your friends are using Twitter, you can include their account inside your With check-in, even if they don’t have a profile.

Tracking Down Followers

Try checking the bottom left-hand corner of the app window and you’ll notice a square holding your current avatar. Touch this to bring up your user profile page, complete with Twitter bio and URL fully imported.

You can check up on those you follow and how many people are following you. This is the main concept of With — connecting between many social networks and sharing updates with those around you. If you happened to follow anybody earlier in the signup process you can now access that list under Following in the lower left corner. From here, you may unfollow anybody you wish, or also access their profile pages.

Other profile layouts are basically similar to yours, displaying current followers and bio. From these screens it’s a lot easier to find people you’ve never met who are working in the same industry, or possibly those who enjoy similar hobbies. If you have friends already using the network it’s really simple to find people through their profile as well.

If you go back to the app home screen you’ll notice a search button located in the bottom-right. This will bring you back to the search page where the signup process initially dumped you off. If searching Twitter isn’t yielding results, attempt a keyword search. This includes full names and usernames among the many With profiles.

Build Your With Network

Remember that With works like Twitter, so it’s important to follow users you’re interested in. No doubt, it’s a great way to add some action into your live stream and also get your profile noticed. Many users are joining With each day, and the network is growing rapidly.

As you begin to follow many users, it’s only natural that followers will find your profile as well. If you are updating frequently and active in the app, chances are good folks will begin to recognize your profile. Surely there are plenty of great people to meet via the mobile web, and With provides yet another unconventional way.

Another handy feature is that the check-in process will actually notify your Twitter account to any users you are checking into using With. Once you post an update, it’s sent live to Twitter and includes a personal with.me check-in link. We’ve also seen this behavior on Foursquare and Gowalla. With performs all of these tasks so elegantly and requires barely any setup time, it’s truly a wonderful experience. Since the network is also public, it’s easy to include Twitter users and recruit them to With, just from a single update.

Conclusion

The process of meeting people on With is simplified a great deal. If you’re already a Twitter user, then you’ll probably end up with followers by just registering an account. The system is quite elegant with recognizing users and following your friends automatically. But even if some people are skipped over, the search functionality will be able to pick them up lightning fast.

User interface and design patterns are also stunning. Topping off what is one powerful and addictive social networking app, I highly recommend playing around and joining With. It’s a colorful community collective of bright minds and tech-savvy mobile users. And with a free price tag how can you beat the experience?

Since the powerful iOS 4 developer library was introduced, many fantastic app ideas have come to fruition. In the social networking realm we’ve seen Facebook and Twitter exploding into the mobile market. Previously, we had looked into popular check-in services using the powerful GPS feature within every iPhone and iPod touch.

The release of With by Path, Inc has shown some tremendous popularity. It’s a check-in service similar to Gowalla or Foursquare where you not only update your status but include @replies to who you’re currently with. It’s a stroke of genius and promotes a fantastic system for meeting new people in your area. If you’re looking to get started using With, hit the jump to find out more.

Getting Logged In

You can download With app free from the app store and get going right away. Once you’ve launched you’re greeted with a heartwarming “Welcome!” display bubble. This provides some information about the app along with a Twitter Connect button. From what I can tell the app’s website doesn’t offer any type of signup process. For the time being, it seems like you’re only able to create and edit your profile from the mobile app itself.

Moving forward, the Sign In screen is fairly straightforward. The process allows you to sign up for a Twitter account if you do not already have one, or simply input your account details and connect. You’ll be asked to provide an email to complete the process as well. Additionally, your Twitter avatar will be imported into your With account — pretty convenient!

You’ll notice many of the most active user profiles include a custom avatar. This is a powerful way to distinguish yourself amongst the crowd. If you have friends on Twitter, you are able to invite them into With, assuming they can download the app. However, the best way to start meeting people is to dig through suggested users and search out your favorite Twitter accounts.

The Home Screen

One of the nicest features is live streaming updates on your home page. Once you’ve launched With, the app will auto-refresh and update with the latest check-ins. You’ll see each individual user and avatar as they’re included from another With account, or similarly a Twitter account.

In unison with the other popular check-in apps, With gives you the option to snap a picture and tie it into your update — as if check-in services weren’t storing enough information! These are displayed as semi-transparent backgrounds in each user’s live stream. Although this step is optional, it provides a layer of trust and will get your profile seen by more users.

But the biggest way to gain attention and meet people is to be active. This means consistently checking-in with others, whenever possible; Going out to eat, bowling, movies, whatever the occasion may entail. If your friends are using Twitter, you can include their account inside your With check-in, even if they don’t have a profile.

Tracking Down Followers

Try checking the bottom left-hand corner of the app window and you’ll notice a square holding your current avatar. Touch this to bring up your user profile page, complete with Twitter bio and URL fully imported.

You can check up on those you follow and how many people are following you. This is the main concept of With — connecting between many social networks and sharing updates with those around you. If you happened to follow anybody earlier in the signup process you can now access that list under Following in the lower left corner. From here, you may unfollow anybody you wish, or also access their profile pages.

Other profile layouts are basically similar to yours, displaying current followers and bio. From these screens it’s a lot easier to find people you’ve never met who are working in the same industry, or possibly those who enjoy similar hobbies. If you have friends already using the network it’s really simple to find people through their profile as well.

If you go back to the app home screen you’ll notice a search button located in the bottom-right. This will bring you back to the search page where the signup process initially dumped you off. If searching Twitter isn’t yielding results, attempt a keyword search. This includes full names and usernames among the many With profiles.

Build Your With Network

Remember that With works like Twitter, so it’s important to follow users you’re interested in. No doubt, it’s a great way to add some action into your live stream and also get your profile noticed. Many users are joining With each day, and the network is growing rapidly.

As you begin to follow many users, it’s only natural that followers will find your profile as well. If you are updating frequently and active in the app, chances are good folks will begin to recognize your profile. Surely there are plenty of great people to meet via the mobile web, and With provides yet another unconventional way.

Another handy feature is that the check-in process will actually notify your Twitter account to any users you are checking into using With. Once you post an update, it’s sent live to Twitter and includes a personal with.me check-in link. We’ve also seen this behavior on Foursquare and Gowalla. With performs all of these tasks so elegantly and requires barely any setup time, it’s truly a wonderful experience. Since the network is also public, it’s easy to include Twitter users and recruit them to With, just from a single update.

Conclusion

The process of meeting people on With is simplified a great deal. If you’re already a Twitter user, then you’ll probably end up with followers by just registering an account. The system is quite elegant with recognizing users and following your friends automatically. But even if some people are skipped over, the search functionality will be able to pick them up lightning fast.

User interface and design patterns are also stunning. Topping off what is one powerful and addictive social networking app, I highly recommend playing around and joining With. It’s a colorful community collective of bright minds and tech-savvy mobile users. And with a free price tag how can you beat the experience?

Well, WWDC came and went and we still don’t have a new iPhone to hold in our hands. Of course, we knew going into the event that we weren’t going to see new hardware, but now the big question is, when is it going to happen?

Right now, one of the popular theories going around is that Apple will announce it at the annual iPod event in September, and that will be the new release date from here on forward. That sounds pretty good, but we’re not positive that’s going to be the case; Apple could definitely pull a switcheroo and announce it earlier or even later if they want, that way they don’t tick off anyone who bought a Verizon iPhone 4 new earlier this year.

So we’d like to hear from you to see if there’s a general consensus among the masses. When do you think the new iPhone will be released?

Well, WWDC came and went and we still don’t have a new iPhone to hold in our hands. Of course, we knew going into the event that we weren’t going to see new hardware, but now the big question is, when is it going to happen?

Right now, one of the popular theories going around is that Apple will announce it at the annual iPod event in September, and that will be the new release date from here on forward. That sounds pretty good, but we’re not positive that’s going to be the case; Apple could definitely pull a switcheroo and announce it earlier or even later if they want, that way they don’t tick off anyone who bought a Verizon iPhone 4 new earlier this year.

So we’d like to hear from you to see if there’s a general consensus among the masses. When do you think the new iPhone will be released?

Well, WWDC came and went and we still don’t have a new iPhone to hold in our hands. Of course, we knew going into the event that we weren’t going to see new hardware, but now the big question is, when is it going to happen?

Right now, one of the popular theories going around is that Apple will announce it at the annual iPod event in September, and that will be the new release date from here on forward. That sounds pretty good, but we’re not positive that’s going to be the case; Apple could definitely pull a switcheroo and announce it earlier or even later if they want, that way they don’t tick off anyone who bought a Verizon iPhone 4 new earlier this year.

So we’d like to hear from you to see if there’s a general consensus among the masses. When do you think the new iPhone will be released?

Hey iCoders,

So I was given the opportunity to attend WWDC this year, and as it was my first time, I thought I would give some of my thoughts for anyone who is planning on making it in 2012. So for some quick background, WWDC stands for the World Wide Developers Conference. It is Apple’s only public conference now that they are no longer a part of MacWorld. WWDC has been going on since 1995 and currently takes place in San Francisco at Moscone Center West downtown, usually during summer. Tickets this year went for a cool $1600 and sold out in 8 hours or so. So my first tip:

1. If you’re planning on making it there in 2012, be ready to drop the money for the ticket the second they become available. I bet they sell out by lunch PST next year

The ticket gets attached to your Apple ID. This can be confusing if like me you are juggling a few for different client needs, cert complications, or whatever else. Just make sure to buy it with the Apple ID that has YOUR NAME attached to it. The company shown on your badge can easily be changed, but the name cannot.

The conference is usually a full work week, with Friday being a day a lot of developers use to travel home. In order to be ready for the big Monday kickoff with the Keynote, it is best to get into San Francisco on Sunday.

Day 0: Sunday

On Sunday you can go over to Moscone and get your badge and accompanying jacket. They seem to be set in giving jackets to developers now, as they did this last year and this year. Once you get the jacket, it sort of acts as a big marker that you are part of the WWDC group. It easily lets you spot other groups of developers attending the conference and you will see them everywhere downtown while you are there. The rest of Sunday I spent meeting other developers around the city and watching the Finals at a bar and grill around the center. It was important to get to bed early though because Monday was the keynote, and trust me, it is a LONG day.

Day 1: Monday

2:00 AM Wake up call. 2:20 leave the hotel. Sitting about 400th or so around Moscone in a line that by 7 AM will be 3000 developers long. The keynote line is a really unique experience. I attended Mac World 2009 where the MacBook air was released, which had a lot of the same feel, but WWDC’s keynote line is a whole different beast. This line contains a huge percentage of all the professional iOS and OS X developers on the planet. Any company offering a service that they want developers to start utilizing recognizes this as the biggest opportunity to get their market informed about their product.

The bigger winner this year in the PR department was TestFlight. An over the air ad-hoc app beta testing service. They had people giving out t-shirts all day Sunday and told everyone that if you wore them in the keynote line you would get a free breakfast burrito. I wasn’t lucky enough to hear about this, but I managed to get a burrito anyhow. They had water, coffee, t-shirts, lots of cards and even their own taco-truck they brought. They were a big hit with the developers and were a common sight around all sorts of events during the week. The line is a great time to get to know other developers.

Everyone at WWDC is serious. Serious clients, serious products. You’ll definitely get to meet some celebrity developers if you look around. For me it was Paul Haddad of TweetBot fame and Loren Brichter of Tweetie Twitter fame.

By 7AM or so you head into Moscone. They bring everyone up the escalators to the second floor where you can get fruit, pastries, coffee etc. Another 2 hours and change later they file as many people as they can up to the third floor where the keynote takes place. Of course, after all that waiting people go kinda crazy trying to get up there. Having done this now once for MacWorld and once for WWDC here is the best advice I can give.

2. Don’t push, shove, be mean, rude, hit, fight or generally get aggressive. It probably won’t help what seat you actually get and you’ll just seem like a jerk to everyone.

3. Have 1 seat buddy. As long as you get in line kind early, 4 – 5 AM. You will get to the third floor, from there you need a seat buddy. Find 2 seats that work, one stays while the other looks for a better one. If you only need to sit with one other person you will get great seats trust me.

The entire first section is reserved for VIP’s and press. However they do need seat fillers up there. So if you are up for a gamble you can head up to the font alone and hope to get a seat filler seat. A guy who I met at the conference did this and sat right behind Josh Topolsky of Engadget This Is My Next fame.

<Random Plug> This Is My Next is fantastic and I highly recommend the site and especially the podcast to anyone with interest in the tech world </Random Plug>.

Keynote was great to see in person. Steve started out slow, but by a few minutes into iCloud he seemed to have his same old energy about him. Lion is spectacular. I have had it installed for a few weeks now and it represents a very deliberate strategy to eventually meld together Apple’s desktop and mobile ecosystems. The introduction of Lion was especially scathing after the somewhat clumsy reveal of Windows 8 only a few days earlier. While Microsoft seems to be kind of floundering in this new technical landscape, trying desperately to find a strategy to hold on to. Apple is ready to release its strongest desktop OS ever, that has some very specific philosophical adoptions from its dominant mobile OS. Oh yeah, and it’s going to be $30. Going to be very interesting to see if Microsoft will make Windows more affordable in response to this pricing decision.

After the keynote you get a few hours before sessions start up. Monday has only one set of sessions to go to, which all represent “State of the Unions” for different technical tracks. The tracks covered at WWDC are

Application Framework

Graphics and Media

Developer Tools

Web Technologies

Core OS

The State of the Unions this year were very enlightening. As many of you already know, iOS 5 and Lion represent radical changes to the very fundamental architectural components of Objective C and UIKit. There will be iOS 5 specific technology articles coming very soon to iCodeBlog.

After sessions it was on to the parties. WWDC has tons of awesome events all around the center the whole week. Usually you have to preregister for them. This great app called Party List came out this year to let everyone know of the big events going on (http://www.wwdcpartylist.com/). Hopefully this same thing will be around next year. Parties vary in terms of perks. But for most you can expect a free drink or two and usually some antics. Srcibd’s party was particularly interesting this year. It was held in their office and involved go-carts, pogo sticks and at least one broken ankle. Very interesting in deed. The parties are a great place to network, hand our cards etc. But they can get exhausting and you want to have energy for the days.

Day 2 – 5: Tuesday – Friday

The remaining days are very similar in terms of what you can do while there. There are basically 3 activities:

Sessions

Labs

One on One’s

Sessions

At first look through WWDC’s offerings, sessions seem like the main attraction. They go on all day every day, and cover every topic imaginable. You get to see real Apple engineers, show off the new API’s they have just finished working on, and get excited about all the new things you’ll be able to code with the coming release. With this said, go to as few as possible. You get all of them whether or not you went to WWDC a few weeks later, and in the case of WWDC 2011, the stuff you learn won’t be able to run on consumers device till “Fall”, IE. whenever iOS 5 drops. Because of this, most WWDC veterans I met advised against spending a lot of times in the sessions.

In previous years sessions also included Q&A’s which were not included in the videos of the sessions. However this year there wasn’t a Q&A at and of the sessions I attended, giving even less of an incentive to attend them. With all that said, I did enjoy the sessions I went to this year immensely. If you are an iOS developer, please watch them! They will improve the quality of the code you write and philosophies you bring to your architecture, guaranteed (HINT: If you’re not using Core Graphics somewhere in your app, your probably doing it wrong).

4. Sessions are available in HD for no cost 3 weeks after the conference. If there is something else you want to do over a session, choose that.

Labs

Labs are located on the first floor of Moscone. There are 5 labs, one for each of the WWDC tracks. The labs were kinda hit and miss. It seemed like they were best for people who had incredibly specific issues they wanted to talk through with an engineer. The labs had scheduled times for specific topics, IE. Core Data Lab, UIKit Lab and so on. If you showed up for one of these, you usually needed to wait in a pretty decent line, but one you got to the front an Apple Engineer would be assigned to you and do their best to help with your problem. While many people seemed to get a lot of value out of these labs I had a great experience and a crappy one.

On the second day I was itching to get Lion running on a seperate partition on my machine. One really cool thing about WWDC is the type of internet access they provide down in the lab. There are probably near 1000 ethernet plugs all over the room where I got the fastest internet I have ever seen. I was able to download Lion, iOS 5 SDK and Xcode and iOS 5 Image for iPad and iPhone in about 15 mintues. I had some install difficulties and this awesome engineer in the Core OS lab was able to help me repair my disk and get Lion installed. That experience with the labs was great.

On the other hand, on my last day there I went over to the Core Graphics lab for some assistance with a rendering problem I am having with my new Twitter app Bird’s Eye, the experience was not as good.

<Sameless Plug> Check out my new iPad app Bird’s Eye. It is a real time, Twitter browser with a location context. And it’s free! </Shameless Plug>.

The problem I’m having involves a MKAnnotationView rendering when I am adding them to my Map. When I got to the front of the line and explained I was having rendering problems involving Map Kit, 3 different Apple Engineers looked at me with no idea what MapKit was. Disappointing to say the least. I eventually did talk to someone but wasn’t able to get any solid advice out of the time. I guess this problem did walk a thin line between Core Graphics and UIKit, but come on. MapKit is an old and popular API, I would expect better from Apple engineers.

5. Labs pay off big time if you have a specific hurdle you can’t get over. There will be a line, but stick with it, the personal attention will be well worth the wait.

One on One’s

The final thing you could fill your days with were One-On-One’s. This year Apple provided a WWDC app for all attendees. It showed you a schedule for everyday, photos and also had a section to make reservations. These reservations allowed developers to schedule one-on-one meetings with different Apple employees. There were sessions for Mac/iOS UI/UX consulting, App Store Approval consulting for both Mac/iOS, iTunes Connect, Developer Program Services and Developer Publications. I know these are hot tickets from other articles I have read about attending WWDC. This year you would use the app to get reservations. The app only said check back after Monday’s keynote to make reservations for these sessions. Right after the keynote I checked with no luck of being able to make reservations. I continued to check all night with no change.

Waking up early on Tuesday morning there was some change, but clicking the reserve button caused nothing to happen. I couldn’t help but reflect on how I heard several speakers during Monday’s sessions say something like:

“Users expect your app to responsive when you click around, so make sure network connections and other operations occur outside of the main thread and to continually update your user interface.”

So it turns out their system got overloaded and allowed many people to get resevations and confirmation email for the exact same time, sometimes without the people at the one-on-ones even having a record of it. After hearing all the Apple engineers boast nonstop about how “Magical” all of the conflict resolution stuff was in iCloud it didn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. But I digress.

I did eventually get an appointment with both an iOS App Reviewer and iOS UI/UX engineer. I will be having a separate post in the next few weeks about a little app I tried to get into the store but have failed to do so. I decided to open source it. I’ll keep you all posted. The UI/UX engineer was great. Lots of great ideas on enhancement and updates to my user interface and general app usability.

6. If you think your project would benefit from one of these One-On-One’s make this your primary mission at WWDC before anything else. They will fill up, and probably within a few hours.

Wrap Up

So that is my somewhat lengthy first time reflection on WWDC. The one thing that I think is hard to capture is the excitement that fills downtown for that week. I got to interact with people who make some of the applications that are major setpieces in modern culture, and I consider that to be a real privilege. Everyone you talk to is excited about their apps, the new technologies and the general future, and I consider myself lucky to be in an industry where I get to experience that. In the world of OS X and iOS developer there are two kinds of conferences. WWDC and the other ones. I can’t wait to get my ticket for next year and head back. I hope I see some of you there.

Thanks for reading. Follow me @cruffenach

Hey iCoders,

So I was given the opportunity to attend WWDC this year, and as it was my first time, I thought I would give some of my thoughts for anyone who is planning on making it in 2012. So for some quick background, WWDC stands for the World Wide Developers Conference. It is Apple’s only public conference now that they are no longer a part of MacWorld. WWDC has been going on since 1995 and currently takes place in San Francisco at Moscone Center West downtown, usually during summer. Tickets this year went for a cool $1600 and sold out in 8 hours or so. So my first tip:

1. If you’re planning on making it there in 2012, be ready to drop the money for the ticket the second they become available. I bet they sell out by lunch PST next year

The ticket gets attached to your Apple ID. This can be confusing if like me you are juggling a few for different client needs, cert complications, or whatever else. Just make sure to buy it with the Apple ID that has YOUR NAME attached to it. The company shown on your badge can easily be changed, but the name cannot.

The conference is usually a full work week, with Friday being a day a lot of developers use to travel home. In order to be ready for the big Monday kickoff with the Keynote, it is best to get into San Francisco on Sunday.

Day 0: Sunday

On Sunday you can go over to Moscone and get your badge and accompanying jacket. They seem to be set in giving jackets to developers now, as they did this last year and this year. Once you get the jacket, it sort of acts as a big marker that you are part of the WWDC group. It easily lets you spot other groups of developers attending the conference and you will see them everywhere downtown while you are there. The rest of Sunday I spent meeting other developers around the city and watching the Finals at a bar and grill around the center. It was important to get to bed early though because Monday was the keynote, and trust me, it is a LONG day.

Day 1: Monday

2:00 AM Wake up call. 2:20 leave the hotel. Sitting about 400th or so around Moscone in a line that by 7 AM will be 3000 developers long. The keynote line is a really unique experience. I attended Mac World 2009 where the MacBook air was released, which had a lot of the same feel, but WWDC’s keynote line is a whole different beast. This line contains a huge percentage of all the professional iOS and OS X developers on the planet. Any company offering a service that they want developers to start utilizing recognizes this as the biggest opportunity to get their market informed about their product.

The bigger winner this year in the PR department was TestFlight. An over the air ad-hoc app beta testing service. They had people giving out t-shirts all day Sunday and told everyone that if you wore them in the keynote line you would get a free breakfast burrito. I wasn’t lucky enough to hear about this, but I managed to get a burrito anyhow. They had water, coffee, t-shirts, lots of cards and even their own taco-truck they brought. They were a big hit with the developers and were a common sight around all sorts of events during the week. The line is a great time to get to know other developers.

Everyone at WWDC is serious. Serious clients, serious products. You’ll definitely get to meet some celebrity developers if you look around. For me it was Paul Haddad of TweetBot fame and Loren Brichter of Tweetie Twitter fame.

By 7AM or so you head into Moscone. They bring everyone up the escalators to the second floor where you can get fruit, pastries, coffee etc. Another 2 hours and change later they file as many people as they can up to the third floor where the keynote takes place. Of course, after all that waiting people go kinda crazy trying to get up there. Having done this now once for MacWorld and once for WWDC here is the best advice I can give.

2. Don’t push, shove, be mean, rude, hit, fight or generally get aggressive. It probably won’t help what seat you actually get and you’ll just seem like a jerk to everyone.

3. Have 1 seat buddy. As long as you get in line kind early, 4 – 5 AM. You will get to the third floor, from there you need a seat buddy. Find 2 seats that work, one stays while the other looks for a better one. If you only need to sit with one other person you will get great seats trust me.

The entire first section is reserved for VIP’s and press. However they do need seat fillers up there. So if you are up for a gamble you can head up to the font alone and hope to get a seat filler seat. A guy who I met at the conference did this and sat right behind Josh Topolsky of Engadget This Is My Next fame.

<Random Plug> This Is My Next is fantastic and I highly recommend the site and especially the podcast to anyone with interest in the tech world </Random Plug>.

Keynote was great to see in person. Steve started out slow, but by a few minutes into iCloud he seemed to have his same old energy about him. Lion is spectacular. I have had it installed for a few weeks now and it represents a very deliberate strategy to eventually meld together Apple’s desktop and mobile ecosystems. The introduction of Lion was especially scathing after the somewhat clumsy reveal of Windows 8 only a few days earlier. While Microsoft seems to be kind of floundering in this new technical landscape, trying desperately to find a strategy to hold on to. Apple is ready to release its strongest desktop OS ever, that has some very specific philosophical adoptions from its dominant mobile OS. Oh yeah, and it’s going to be $30. Going to be very interesting to see if Microsoft will make Windows more affordable in response to this pricing decision.

After the keynote you get a few hours before sessions start up. Monday has only one set of sessions to go to, which all represent “State of the Unions” for different technical tracks. The tracks covered at WWDC are

Application Framework

Graphics and Media

Developer Tools

Web Technologies

Core OS

The State of the Unions this year were very enlightening. As many of you already know, iOS 5 and Lion represent radical changes to the very fundamental architectural components of Objective C and UIKit. There will be iOS 5 specific technology articles coming very soon to iCodeBlog.

After sessions it was on to the parties. WWDC has tons of awesome events all around the center the whole week. Usually you have to preregister for them. This great app called Party List came out this year to let everyone know of the big events going on (http://www.wwdcpartylist.com/). Hopefully this same thing will be around next year. Parties vary in terms of perks. But for most you can expect a free drink or two and usually some antics. Srcibd’s party was particularly interesting this year. It was held in their office and involved go-carts, pogo sticks and at least one broken ankle. Very interesting in deed. The parties are a great place to network, hand our cards etc. But they can get exhausting and you want to have energy for the days.

Day 2 – 5: Tuesday – Friday

The remaining days are very similar in terms of what you can do while there. There are basically 3 activities:

Sessions

Labs

One on One’s

Sessions

At first look through WWDC’s offerings, sessions seem like the main attraction. They go on all day every day, and cover every topic imaginable. You get to see real Apple engineers, show off the new API’s they have just finished working on, and get excited about all the new things you’ll be able to code with the coming release. With this said, go to as few as possible. You get all of them whether or not you went to WWDC a few weeks later, and in the case of WWDC 2011, the stuff you learn won’t be able to run on consumers device till “Fall”, IE. whenever iOS 5 drops. Because of this, most WWDC veterans I met advised against spending a lot of times in the sessions.

In previous years sessions also included Q&A’s which were not included in the videos of the sessions. However this year there wasn’t a Q&A at and of the sessions I attended, giving even less of an incentive to attend them. With all that said, I did enjoy the sessions I went to this year immensely. If you are an iOS developer, please watch them! They will improve the quality of the code you write and philosophies you bring to your architecture, guaranteed (HINT: If you’re not using Core Graphics somewhere in your app, your probably doing it wrong).

4. Sessions are available in HD for no cost 3 weeks after the conference. If there is something else you want to do over a session, choose that.

Labs

Labs are located on the first floor of Moscone. There are 5 labs, one for each of the WWDC tracks. The labs were kinda hit and miss. It seemed like they were best for people who had incredibly specific issues they wanted to talk through with an engineer. The labs had scheduled times for specific topics, IE. Core Data Lab, UIKit Lab and so on. If you showed up for one of these, you usually needed to wait in a pretty decent line, but one you got to the front an Apple Engineer would be assigned to you and do their best to help with your problem. While many people seemed to get a lot of value out of these labs I had a great experience and a crappy one.

On the second day I was itching to get Lion running on a seperate partition on my machine. One really cool thing about WWDC is the type of internet access they provide down in the lab. There are probably near 1000 ethernet plugs all over the room where I got the fastest internet I have ever seen. I was able to download Lion, iOS 5 SDK and Xcode and iOS 5 Image for iPad and iPhone in about 15 mintues. I had some install difficulties and this awesome engineer in the Core OS lab was able to help me repair my disk and get Lion installed. That experience with the labs was great.

On the other hand, on my last day there I went over to the Core Graphics lab for some assistance with a rendering problem I am having with my new Twitter app Bird’s Eye, the experience was not as good.

<Sameless Plug> Check out my new iPad app Bird’s Eye. It is a real time, Twitter browser with a location context. And it’s free! </Shameless Plug>.

The problem I’m having involves a MKAnnotationView rendering when I am adding them to my Map. When I got to the front of the line and explained I was having rendering problems involving Map Kit, 3 different Apple Engineers looked at me with no idea what MapKit was. Disappointing to say the least. I eventually did talk to someone but wasn’t able to get any solid advice out of the time. I guess this problem did walk a thin line between Core Graphics and UIKit, but come on. MapKit is an old and popular API, I would expect better from Apple engineers.

5. Labs pay off big time if you have a specific hurdle you can’t get over. There will be a line, but stick with it, the personal attention will be well worth the wait.

One on One’s

The final thing you could fill your days with were One-On-One’s. This year Apple provided a WWDC app for all attendees. It showed you a schedule for everyday, photos and also had a section to make reservations. These reservations allowed developers to schedule one-on-one meetings with different Apple employees. There were sessions for Mac/iOS UI/UX consulting, App Store Approval consulting for both Mac/iOS, iTunes Connect, Developer Program Services and Developer Publications. I know these are hot tickets from other articles I have read about attending WWDC. This year you would use the app to get reservations. The app only said check back after Monday’s keynote to make reservations for these sessions. Right after the keynote I checked with no luck of being able to make reservations. I continued to check all night with no change.

Waking up early on Tuesday morning there was some change, but clicking the reserve button caused nothing to happen. I couldn’t help but reflect on how I heard several speakers during Monday’s sessions say something like:

“Users expect your app to responsive when you click around, so make sure network connections and other operations occur outside of the main thread and to continually update your user interface.”

So it turns out their system got overloaded and allowed many people to get resevations and confirmation email for the exact same time, sometimes without the people at the one-on-ones even having a record of it. After hearing all the Apple engineers boast nonstop about how “Magical” all of the conflict resolution stuff was in iCloud it didn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. But I digress.

I did eventually get an appointment with both an iOS App Reviewer and iOS UI/UX engineer. I will be having a separate post in the next few weeks about a little app I tried to get into the store but have failed to do so. I decided to open source it. I’ll keep you all posted. The UI/UX engineer was great. Lots of great ideas on enhancement and updates to my user interface and general app usability.

6. If you think your project would benefit from one of these One-On-One’s make this your primary mission at WWDC before anything else. They will fill up, and probably within a few hours.

Wrap Up

So that is my somewhat lengthy first time reflection on WWDC. The one thing that I think is hard to capture is the excitement that fills downtown for that week. I got to interact with people who make some of the applications that are major setpieces in modern culture, and I consider that to be a real privilege. Everyone you talk to is excited about their apps, the new technologies and the general future, and I consider myself lucky to be in an industry where I get to experience that. In the world of OS X and iOS developer there are two kinds of conferences. WWDC and the other ones. I can’t wait to get my ticket for next year and head back. I hope I see some of you there.

Thanks for reading. Follow me @cruffenach

Hey iCoders,

So I was given the opportunity to attend WWDC this year, and as it was my first time, I thought I would give some of my thoughts for anyone who is planning on making it in 2012. So for some quick background, WWDC stands for the World Wide Developers Conference. It is Apple’s only public conference now that they are no longer a part of MacWorld. WWDC has been going on since 1995 and currently takes place in San Francisco at Moscone Center West downtown, usually during summer. Tickets this year went for a cool $1600 and sold out in 8 hours or so. So my first tip:

1. If you’re planning on making it there in 2012, be ready to drop the money for the ticket the second they become available. I bet they sell out by lunch PST next year

The ticket gets attached to your Apple ID. This can be confusing if like me you are juggling a few for different client needs, cert complications, or whatever else. Just make sure to buy it with the Apple ID that has YOUR NAME attached to it. The company shown on your badge can easily be changed, but the name cannot.

The conference is usually a full work week, with Friday being a day a lot of developers use to travel home. In order to be ready for the big Monday kickoff with the Keynote, it is best to get into San Francisco on Sunday.

Day 0: Sunday

On Sunday you can go over to Moscone and get your badge and accompanying jacket. They seem to be set in giving jackets to developers now, as they did this last year and this year. Once you get the jacket, it sort of acts as a big marker that you are part of the WWDC group. It easily lets you spot other groups of developers attending the conference and you will see them everywhere downtown while you are there. The rest of Sunday I spent meeting other developers around the city and watching the Finals at a bar and grill around the center. It was important to get to bed early though because Monday was the keynote, and trust me, it is a LONG day.

Day 1: Monday

2:00 AM Wake up call. 2:20 leave the hotel. Sitting about 400th or so around Moscone in a line that by 7 AM will be 3000 developers long. The keynote line is a really unique experience. I attended Mac World 2009 where the MacBook air was released, which had a lot of the same feel, but WWDC’s keynote line is a whole different beast. This line contains a huge percentage of all the professional iOS and OS X developers on the planet. Any company offering a service that they want developers to start utilizing recognizes this as the biggest opportunity to get their market informed about their product.

The bigger winner this year in the PR department was TestFlight. An over the air ad-hoc app beta testing service. They had people giving out t-shirts all day Sunday and told everyone that if you wore them in the keynote line you would get a free breakfast burrito. I wasn’t lucky enough to hear about this, but I managed to get a burrito anyhow. They had water, coffee, t-shirts, lots of cards and even their own taco-truck they brought. They were a big hit with the developers and were a common sight around all sorts of events during the week. The line is a great time to get to know other developers.

Everyone at WWDC is serious. Serious clients, serious products. You’ll definitely get to meet some celebrity developers if you look around. For me it was Paul Haddad of TweetBot fame and Loren Brichter of Tweetie Twitter fame.

By 7AM or so you head into Moscone. They bring everyone up the escalators to the second floor where you can get fruit, pastries, coffee etc. Another 2 hours and change later they file as many people as they can up to the third floor where the keynote takes place. Of course, after all that waiting people go kinda crazy trying to get up there. Having done this now once for MacWorld and once for WWDC here is the best advice I can give.

2. Don’t push, shove, be mean, rude, hit, fight or generally get aggressive. It probably won’t help what seat you actually get and you’ll just seem like a jerk to everyone.

3. Have 1 seat buddy. As long as you get in line kind early, 4 – 5 AM. You will get to the third floor, from there you need a seat buddy. Find 2 seats that work, one stays while the other looks for a better one. If you only need to sit with one other person you will get great seats trust me.

The entire first section is reserved for VIP’s and press. However they do need seat fillers up there. So if you are up for a gamble you can head up to the font alone and hope to get a seat filler seat. A guy who I met at the conference did this and sat right behind Josh Topolsky of Engadget This Is My Next fame.

<Random Plug> This Is My Next is fantastic and I highly recommend the site and especially the podcast to anyone with interest in the tech world </Random Plug>.

Keynote was great to see in person. Steve started out slow, but by a few minutes into iCloud he seemed to have his same old energy about him. Lion is spectacular. I have had it installed for a few weeks now and it represents a very deliberate strategy to eventually meld together Apple’s desktop and mobile ecosystems. The introduction of Lion was especially scathing after the somewhat clumsy reveal of Windows 8 only a few days earlier. While Microsoft seems to be kind of floundering in this new technical landscape, trying desperately to find a strategy to hold on to. Apple is ready to release its strongest desktop OS ever, that has some very specific philosophical adoptions from its dominant mobile OS. Oh yeah, and it’s going to be $30. Going to be very interesting to see if Microsoft will make Windows more affordable in response to this pricing decision.

After the keynote you get a few hours before sessions start up. Monday has only one set of sessions to go to, which all represent “State of the Unions” for different technical tracks. The tracks covered at WWDC are

Application Framework

Graphics and Media

Developer Tools

Web Technologies

Core OS

The State of the Unions this year were very enlightening. As many of you already know, iOS 5 and Lion represent radical changes to the very fundamental architectural components of Objective C and UIKit. There will be iOS 5 specific technology articles coming very soon to iCodeBlog.

After sessions it was on to the parties. WWDC has tons of awesome events all around the center the whole week. Usually you have to preregister for them. This great app called Party List came out this year to let everyone know of the big events going on (http://www.wwdcpartylist.com/). Hopefully this same thing will be around next year. Parties vary in terms of perks. But for most you can expect a free drink or two and usually some antics. Srcibd’s party was particularly interesting this year. It was held in their office and involved go-carts, pogo sticks and at least one broken ankle. Very interesting in deed. The parties are a great place to network, hand our cards etc. But they can get exhausting and you want to have energy for the days.

Day 2 – 5: Tuesday – Friday

The remaining days are very similar in terms of what you can do while there. There are basically 3 activities:

Sessions

Labs

One on One’s

Sessions

At first look through WWDC’s offerings, sessions seem like the main attraction. They go on all day every day, and cover every topic imaginable. You get to see real Apple engineers, show off the new API’s they have just finished working on, and get excited about all the new things you’ll be able to code with the coming release. With this said, go to as few as possible. You get all of them whether or not you went to WWDC a few weeks later, and in the case of WWDC 2011, the stuff you learn won’t be able to run on consumers device till “Fall”, IE. whenever iOS 5 drops. Because of this, most WWDC veterans I met advised against spending a lot of times in the sessions.

In previous years sessions also included Q&A’s which were not included in the videos of the sessions. However this year there wasn’t a Q&A at and of the sessions I attended, giving even less of an incentive to attend them. With all that said, I did enjoy the sessions I went to this year immensely. If you are an iOS developer, please watch them! They will improve the quality of the code you write and philosophies you bring to your architecture, guaranteed (HINT: If you’re not using Core Graphics somewhere in your app, your probably doing it wrong).

4. Sessions are available in HD for no cost 3 weeks after the conference. If there is something else you want to do over a session, choose that.

Labs

Labs are located on the first floor of Moscone. There are 5 labs, one for each of the WWDC tracks. The labs were kinda hit and miss. It seemed like they were best for people who had incredibly specific issues they wanted to talk through with an engineer. The labs had scheduled times for specific topics, IE. Core Data Lab, UIKit Lab and so on. If you showed up for one of these, you usually needed to wait in a pretty decent line, but one you got to the front an Apple Engineer would be assigned to you and do their best to help with your problem. While many people seemed to get a lot of value out of these labs I had a great experience and a crappy one.

On the second day I was itching to get Lion running on a seperate partition on my machine. One really cool thing about WWDC is the type of internet access they provide down in the lab. There are probably near 1000 ethernet plugs all over the room where I got the fastest internet I have ever seen. I was able to download Lion, iOS 5 SDK and Xcode and iOS 5 Image for iPad and iPhone in about 15 mintues. I had some install difficulties and this awesome engineer in the Core OS lab was able to help me repair my disk and get Lion installed. That experience with the labs was great.

On the other hand, on my last day there I went over to the Core Graphics lab for some assistance with a rendering problem I am having with my new Twitter app Bird’s Eye, the experience was not as good.

<Sameless Plug> Check out my new iPad app Bird’s Eye. It is a real time, Twitter browser with a location context. And it’s free! </Shameless Plug>.

The problem I’m having involves a MKAnnotationView rendering when I am adding them to my Map. When I got to the front of the line and explained I was having rendering problems involving Map Kit, 3 different Apple Engineers looked at me with no idea what MapKit was. Disappointing to say the least. I eventually did talk to someone but wasn’t able to get any solid advice out of the time. I guess this problem did walk a thin line between Core Graphics and UIKit, but come on. MapKit is an old and popular API, I would expect better from Apple engineers.

5. Labs pay off big time if you have a specific hurdle you can’t get over. There will be a line, but stick with it, the personal attention will be well worth the wait.

One on One’s

The final thing you could fill your days with were One-On-One’s. This year Apple provided a WWDC app for all attendees. It showed you a schedule for everyday, photos and also had a section to make reservations. These reservations allowed developers to schedule one-on-one meetings with different Apple employees. There were sessions for Mac/iOS UI/UX consulting, App Store Approval consulting for both Mac/iOS, iTunes Connect, Developer Program Services and Developer Publications. I know these are hot tickets from other articles I have read about attending WWDC. This year you would use the app to get reservations. The app only said check back after Monday’s keynote to make reservations for these sessions. Right after the keynote I checked with no luck of being able to make reservations. I continued to check all night with no change.

Waking up early on Tuesday morning there was some change, but clicking the reserve button caused nothing to happen. I couldn’t help but reflect on how I heard several speakers during Monday’s sessions say something like:

“Users expect your app to responsive when you click around, so make sure network connections and other operations occur outside of the main thread and to continually update your user interface.”

So it turns out their system got overloaded and allowed many people to get resevations and confirmation email for the exact same time, sometimes without the people at the one-on-ones even having a record of it. After hearing all the Apple engineers boast nonstop about how “Magical” all of the conflict resolution stuff was in iCloud it didn’t exactly give me a warm and fuzzy feeling. But I digress.

I did eventually get an appointment with both an iOS App Reviewer and iOS UI/UX engineer. I will be having a separate post in the next few weeks about a little app I tried to get into the store but have failed to do so. I decided to open source it. I’ll keep you all posted. The UI/UX engineer was great. Lots of great ideas on enhancement and updates to my user interface and general app usability.

6. If you think your project would benefit from one of these One-On-One’s make this your primary mission at WWDC before anything else. They will fill up, and probably within a few hours.

Wrap Up

So that is my somewhat lengthy first time reflection on WWDC. The one thing that I think is hard to capture is the excitement that fills downtown for that week. I got to interact with people who make some of the applications that are major setpieces in modern culture, and I consider that to be a real privilege. Everyone you talk to is excited about their apps, the new technologies and the general future, and I consider myself lucky to be in an industry where I get to experience that. In the world of OS X and iOS developer there are two kinds of conferences. WWDC and the other ones. I can’t wait to get my ticket for next year and head back. I hope I see some of you there.

Thanks for reading. Follow me @cruffenach