Well, after spending a very pleasant ten days in San Francisco, I’m back in the U.K., jet-lag and all. Seriously, I’m still feeling pretty tired, and I got back on Wednesday (by the time I made it home, it was late afternoon and I’d been travelling for over 33 hours and awake for a good nine hours before that). Eight hours’ time difference is a real killer when flying East; wandering round earlier today, I felt like a character from Night of the Living Dead :-) Well, apart from the eating other people part, anyway.

Predictably, it has been raining here. Actually it seems to have been raining rather a lot, with the result that there has been flooding in one or two places (not here on the south coast, thankfully). The temperature isn’t too bad though, so at least I don’t feel cold as well as tired.

Oh, I should add that, if you’re ever thinking of going to San Francisco, Hotel Monaco is a great place to stay. It’s much better than the usual chain hotels—they really made me feel at home and it was particularly pleasant having a living room area where you can meet and talk to other hotel guests.

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Earlier this evening, I attended the CocoaHeads presentation in the San Francisco Apple Store, which was hosted by Scott Stevenson and included segments from Wil Shipley, Daniel Jalkut and Gus Mueller, as well as a Q&A session which also included Brent Simmons.

So, aside from complementing Scott and the CocoaHeads people on having organised the event, and the speakers for their interesting remarks (and especially the highly charismatic Wil Shipley), I wanted to make a few points of my own. In retrospect I wish I had talked to Scott beforehand by e-mail, because I think it might have been interesting to hear my perspective as a European indie Mac developer (I guess I must be indie, since my company only has three employees, one of them me, and most of what they were talking about seemed familiar), and also as a developer crazy enough to choose a high-support, high-maintenance (and high risk) sector like disk utility apps.

I’ll divide things up by topic, as there were a few things that I think might have been worth saying (and one thing that I did say, but that I think I can elaborate on a bit).

Continue reading “CocoaHeads WWDC 2007” $raquo;

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Well, I’m now in San Francisco for WWDC 2007. I’m pretty tired after over 10 hours of flight, not to mention an overnight stay in the Heathrow Renaissance (which was very comfortable, aside from not having any hot water in the bath/shower in the early morning when I was getting up, and the usual problems of not sleeping well in a new place and/or when worrying about making certain to get to the airport on time).

Still, I’m looking forward to WWDC this year. I was last here in 2005, but I think 2007’s conference should be much more interesting, both for me and for my company (I have a distinct feeling that Apple are going to do something that’s awkward for us, again… though I should add that we do expect that to some extent, and all the things that fall into that category are good for end users).

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Apparently, Apple’s new DRM-free music embeds your name and e-mail address in the music files, presumably so that it’s easy to find out whose copy of the file was illegally distributed (when it inevitable is).

A MacNN article is quoting Fred von Lohmann, one of the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior intellectual property attorneys, as having said that

Some of the privacy problems, in light of this, is [sic] that anyone who steals an iPod that includes purchased iTunes music will now have the name and e-mail address of its rightful owner.

Forgive me for pointing out the obvious, but people commonly mark their name and address onto items that they don’t want to lose, presumably on the assumption that it’s more likely that something will be lost and then found (and maybe handed in) by an honest individual, rather than stolen.

In fact, many devices (iPods included, if I remember correctly) have special options to let the user put their name and address in them.

I’m sure the response from the “privacy” advocates will be that the user has the option to set these settings, whereas they have no choice over whether this information is embedded in their music files or not. But even if that’s true, it’s a very weak argument indeed.

(For those who are wondering, I put privacy in quotes when I talk about “privacy” advocates, because most of them are not, in fact, advocating privacy. Instead, the majority advocate anonymity, which is quite different and has many effects that are detrimental to the rest of society [for instance, it’s much easier and safer to commit fraud and other crimes if you have anonymity…]. Fred von Lohmann’s comments suggest that he is one of these anonymity advocates.)

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