WWDC Videos

Today another set of WWDC videos was posted on iTunes. The ADC on iTunes section in the iTunes Store now has two sub-sections with video's available, the Leopard Sessions from WWDC 2006 and the new WWDC 2006 Sessions. The two remaining sub-sections Scientific Poster Session Podcasts and Foundational Sessions have yet to be filled with content.

When I attended a session it was made clear every time the session would be recorded, either slides and sound only, or using video for the bigger sessions. At WWDC everybody was already wondering if the sessions would become available on DVD like a few years ago. In 2005 the sessions were only available as video streams the size of a stamp, with the additional disadvantage that you had to re-stream them if you wanted to view them again.

So no DVD's this year, but in my opinion an even better solution, video's on iTunes. The video's can be downloaded without DRM, and replayed over and over again.

According to the Apple developer website only Select and Premier Members can download the videos. I'm a student developer who visited the WWDC this summer, so it seems everyone who visited WWDC can download the videos too, cool!

My Software

So far I didn't create really interesting software yet. Most of the stuff I created isn't finished yet or abandoned already. However there are a few pieces of code I created which I thought were good enough to release into the wild.

Ribbit
Ribbit is a plugin for the popular Azureus bittorrent client. Ribbit takes advantage of Growl to display notifications like Download Finished.

SimilarTunes
This is my first public Cocoa application. It is a helper tool to create playlists in iTunes based on music similarity. When you enter an artist, SimilarTunes uses different webservices to find similar artists. It then shows a list of all similar artists you actually have in you music library.

Update:
My primary web server is down because of a dsl upgrade, the ISP has shut down all ports. I set up a mirror: Ribbit and SimilarTunes

Why this weblog?

Welcome to my new weblog. I won't introduce myself again, see my profile for more about me. I will tell you that I've started multiple weblogs before, none of which existed very long, but I intend to change this. So why another weblog and why do I think this one will survive?

I own a Apple Powerbook 12" for over three years now. I've always programmed, mostly using Java. Being interested in programming I had to explore the Java features of XCode. I wasn't that impressed, but I was impressed about what I could do with XCode and Objective-C. I almost instantly liked Objective-C better then Java. This eventually made me signup for an Apple Student Developer membership, with in the back of my mind the possibility to sign up for a WWDC scholarship. I did send in a WWDC scholarship application, not knowing what my chances were, but eventually a WWDC ticket showed up in my ADC library.

So this summer I made my first visit to an Apple WWDC conference!

Inspired by all the things I've seen there, I got back to the Netherlands with renewed energy to start developing new software. I'll try to keep you posted about my adventures on my journey as a cocoa developer as much as possible.

For the one or two readers that are actually reading this weblog, wondering why it's called Cocoa Pirate: I said I will post about my Cocoa adventures (Adventures -> Pirate - Thus Cocoa Pirate, lol)