Wow, so the past 2 weeks have been to say the least HEAVEY!!
The first week was all things JavaOne... well okay, all things JavaFX. :(
They ripped me off by not giving me an alumni jacket because I won a contest a couple years back and get to go on a special pass... not so special I see after all.
JERKS!!!
With that there were some good takeaways, those being that Groovy has the ability to code JavaFX... and do stuff that not even JavaFX is known to do. Maybe that is what you can do when you have a real language instead of a scripting language. ;)
The Netbeans 4.7 tools were interesting, and maybe worth a look as they seem to get out of the way a bit more than they use to or as eclipse does.. (not fully reviewed). But they say in the future (sometime before December. [note no year is stated] ) we may have a Mobile development version for Mac.
Then there was the "After Hours Bash" Now that was really cool. They brought in the WCR.com folks (World Class Rockers) from vintage bands of my youth, very good stuff that I totally enjoyed.
Now WWDC... OMG.. Wow they totally took the 1299$ investment in a system I made 9mo ago and completely invalidated it. :( The things about my 13" macbook that I was bummed about was the 2.0 ghz CPU, was hoping for 2.1 or higher, the lack of Firewire was almost a deal killer, and the lack of keyboard backlighting, and some type of external memory support was a bit sad.... well this summer's version totally delivers. While they had to remove the digital optical line out that goes through the headphone jack... (what... it had what?? I didn't even know about that feature until 2 months ago.... crud, why didn't they just give me that one last Oct.... oh well)
Ok enough about the hardware... OMG look a new iPhone and 2 that's right 2 new OS's.. Hey they gave me a CD for a preview of Snow Leopard... WOW this thing totally rocks. Upgrade to "snow leopard" You bet your sweet butt I will be upgrading.
The sessions were good, but way too much info to really allow me to focus on in one hour session. That's where JavaOne has the formula down... don't give too much info, or the attendees brains will POP!. My brain popped in the first session. Ouch!!
However the final call is I don't think I'm going back to JavaOne again (even if it's free), but I am not going to WWDC either, it's too much info and it is better, for me, to pull the info out of the videos as I have done with the iTune-U Stanford courses. Oh but I will get the videos for the WWDC's in the future, I hope the not so distant future so the info is still useful.
However the "After Hours Bash" for WWDC started out pretty good, unlike J1 where it was 2 free drinks and some not so tasty food, WWDC had some great asian cuisine, and the american staples (hotdogs), however who the heck is "cake"? that was the band, and honestly... Apple you can do better on the music.... seriously!!!