Erik's Thoughts and Musings

Apple, DevOps, Technology, and Reviews

Revisiting WWDC 2008 Videos

With WWDC a little over a week away, I got interested in reviewing some of the 2008 videos that were posted via ADC on iTunes. The videos can be technical, but they are really good. After the event last year I downloaded about 10 of the sessions that I missed, and a couple other sessions that I went to that were worth watching again.

I was stunned that my favorite session last year was on something that most developers probably think is mundane. It was on Internationalization and Localization (i18n and l10n) of your application. The presenter was really interesting and went into some nice depth on how different locales have different rules for presenting info on the screen. From my Windows development days I already knew about the certain problems related to Western languages like French and German, but seeing how to deal with Right to Left languages like Hebrew and Arabic was really pretty cool. And even the detailed complexity of character presentations in Mandarin, Japanese and other Far East languages was fascinating.

Since I went mostly down the Mac track last year and I am now much more comfortable with Cocoa, I am thinking of going down the iPhone track this year. I have written a number of little demo applications for the iPhone, but nothing worth putting up on the App Store. Maybe WWDC will help spur some thought into a possible do-it-on-the-side product idea.