Apple Tech Talk Thoughts

Just came back from Apple Tech Talk Toronto, except the name change issue at the last minute, and the email account that was supposed to work but it didn’t everything went pretty well, and I had to say that’s one of my best days this November.

I am gonna start by correcting the impression of those whom think this kind of of events are nothing more than a group of nerds get together to talk about things only they care. That’s true, and that’s awesome. When you were emailing or browsing the web on your iPhone while you were waiting for the bus or the food in that favorite restaurant of yours, have you ever appreciated the work the men who created iPhone and the apps have done. I have, and even more after the conference today.

Apple app store is only 15 months old, but more than 100′000 as counting apps are being hosted up there as we speak. Over 18′000 apps are downloaded every minute.

The prerequisite of attending the AITT is a iPhone App developer certificated and at least one iPhone App published on the app store. All seminars focus on technical problems developers face everyday from architecture design to debugging. There is absolutely nothing related to sales and marketing strategies which is fantastic. Usually this kind of events are organized by PR and marketing firms, and are heavily flood by commercials from supporters the PR and marketing firms gather up. That takes a lot of credits out of the significance of the event. The sprite of programming is about scientific innovation which is not PR and marketing is all about. Apple did a good job hosting such an event for developers and developers only.

The conference room in Hyatt Rengency Toronto on King street is fill with approximately 300 iPhone developers today. Many of them comes from varies programming language background, mostly C++ and Java. Plenty of them come from the U.S. Developers in Toronto are lucky to live in one of the four North American cities in which the conferences are hosted.

What impresses me the most is the difference between what Apple tells the public and what they actually did to develop iPhone as a part of the Apple development framework. Stop right there if you think that I talking about their marketing strategy which was very intelligent by the way, but what I am talking about it how much Apple has done to make the system stable and reliable v.s. how little Apple talks about the tremendous amount of work they have done to make it happen.

The Apple system is known by its simplicity and delightful usability. However work never gets done in easy ways. One thing that I keep on hearing today is “take no shortcut, it’s worth”, almost in every seminar by Apple developers. They mean it and they prove to me by showing their methodology of coding. The tools that they develop to help diagnose and fix bugs, the level of detail that these tools dig into, is very deep. All these are done however just so that developers like me can focus on what we care the most without having worry about the boring stuff.

I am not one of those cool artists that likes Mac because their knowledge of PC is narrow. Me myself have been a Window developer since the age of 15. I have seen programmers and companies that build great apps and over emphasis the hard work they have done and the details that they focus on. That scare people because complex devices are more likely to break down. However, Apple has done not any less than that but not much of it has been mentioned to the public. On the other hand Apple’s main focus has always been about fun and enjoyable experience, because, as engineers we know to hell how much pain it’s to code, debug and deal with customers. Why mention it again if it’s painful. It’s like a man who always gets the job done but ask no recognition. The truth is he does get paid well, so forget about pain, time to move on. However to celebrate the achievement should take priority.

So next time when you use a computer (Mac or PC) that gets your job done. Please do appreciate the work and thoughts engineers have done for you. It’s never easy, and never will be.