Apple offers free passes to its World Wide Developers conference to students. Especially foreign students, so my experience tells me. All you need to do is get a student developer membership (USD 99 / year - but you also get a one-time discount for hardware purchases: 20% off!!). See the link at “WWDC 2006 - Student Program” for further details. WWDC is a great and fun event, even if you just want to get started in mac osx programmin g (better: cocoa programming); apple offers a variety of classes, courses - if you are quick to sign up. There is also a special student program: an extra day before WWDC starts with introductuory talks, chances to meet apple guys, a job fair… as well as some entertainment program during the week, usually much partying going on! You also get a free T-shirt and possibly a good look at OSX 10.5
Be sure to book your hotel ahead — the motels will be full soon, as will the cheaper hotels! And usually it is not really worth staying outside of town and commuting in every day, especially if you are renting a car (as would be the only option for out-of-country students).
Again: students from Europe are almost guaranteed a scholarship! But if you have any questions, feel free to posta comment or send me an email!
Published by dekay on August 25, 2005
in mac.
iPod/iTunes/Podcast-phioliacs: go check out CocoaRadio, a podcast dedicated to developers and programming in Cocoa/Objective C.
Reading this article about a failing hard drive as well as this note I realized that it would be pretty neat if I had an available backup solution off-site (like somewhere on the net) for free - just to store really essential files/folders, maybe a total of 100 MB. There would be the possibility of .mac (which is quite easy and useful but not free); then there is my storage at GMX - accessible via WebDAV, but horribly slow; my webhoster (with too few space), and then there is gmail - free, 2 GB space, searchable, accessible from anywhere with a web connection. And happily all you ever need to store stuff is just a fast connection to your webserver. And a script that does the job for you - maybe with a Cocoa-GUI where you can drag & drop certain files & folders - and whoopie, they get sent to your backup gmail address daily. You can always delete stuff from gmail if necessary - or just create another backup account!.
Has anyone seen this little script/tool for OSX yet?
My last post spawned some ideas for a better, much more integrated addressbook:
Grouping of Contacts:
Make a better interface, less a browser but more iconish, where you can drag people around, “duplicate group memberships”, show group overlaps, show which groups a contact belongs to; make it easy to change, add or move. Make it not too easy to accidentally delete a contact completely.
Communication
When I open the addressbook there are many reasons why I do it - but the most important one is: communication: either I want to call someone, send them a letter or… no more. Possible. But why stop there, why stop at just displaying that kind of info? Make a button or some other interactive way to communicate with people - like press the “communicate” button and a list of options comes up: any instant messaging capabilities that are available - like:
- is that person online in AIM, ICQ, Skype? Show those options!
- do you have an email address of that person? Show a button to send an email!
- do you have a mobile number and some way to send SMS? Show a button to do so!
This requires some forms of plugin technology which should not be a problem with Cocoa and a well documented bundle interface / API. Just let the communication service providers write the plugins!
One could even extend that feature even more: I often want to send a file to someone… why not add the ability to drag a file to a contact and then get some options on how to transfer that file - if the contact is online and has some messenger service enabled - send it that way. If there is an email address that can receive a file this big - send it that way. And if there is a too big file or no way - mount that persons server (afp, smb or ftp… even the drop box on any mounted computer or a password protected folder on a .mac account!) or burn a CD. All possibilities start at that one place: drag the file to the contact! Make it really easy and obvious!
Integrate Webservices
- does the contact have a blog -> show some excerpts from the RSS feed
- homepage?
- a del.icio.us account? (via RSS)
- flickr?
- add friendster
- add white pages - to “auto-complete” contact info
Addressbook and/or contact sharing. Just like iTunes, iCal sharing or whatever you like.
MacOSX technologies are great: add the ability to link any item on the computer to a contact. Like a folder that contains project files related to that contact; like tasks and appointments/calendar events that are related to that contact. We are living in a world of networks, of data that is connected. Let us make these connections on the Mac, too! Make it really simple to create links, to “follow the threads of the network”. Show spotlight’s power by giving access to anything related to a contact right there in the addressbook! Emails, Files received, chat logs, web pages/articles, Notes/Agendas…
Make it easy to publish your own data. Auto-update contact info from RSS feeds, attached VCF files.
Publish an RSS feed for any changes to addressbook data! Make it easy to create RSS feeds with certain criteria - completely customizable.
Make the whole system extensible - similar to spotlight where every developer can open their data to indexing. Enable other developers to provide contact related info/data/services - see above for some examples. I can only start dreaming of possibilities: Subethaedit, Delicious Library, all Chat apps, P2P, Photo/Movie sharing, Genealogy, Friendster, multiple recommendation systems, dating websites. Create or use a public, extensible open source protocol for interoperability
Integrate all iApps into this feature! Make it easy to leverage the power of this interconnectivity and of relations between data on your mac!
Access the data of users on the network, on the current machine. Use rendezvous and any directory services that are there to provide “hints of data”.
Make it easy to add pictures to yoir contacts, use any iSights that are there to scan business cards as well as make pictures. Capture pics of video chats ort from mobile phones.
Any more ideas? Who is going to do it?
To all the smart Cocoa-coders out there: How about creating a little app for OSX Tiger that provides an interface like the experimental del.icio.us pop for simple creation of spotlight tags for files & folders?!
The major requirements I can think of are:
- make it easy to summon the window, key-cut, gesture or context menu (or via quicksilver?)
- make addition of tags as easy as selecting already existing tags: see del.icio.us or flickr
- save a list of previously used tags in a .txt file somewhere for easy editing (also via quicksilver)
- When you are done boast to apple about boosting spotlight’s features.
(see Google Groups : 43 Folders for some more ideas/explanations)
Oh, while you are at it - please add iTunes and iPhoto tagging (with the same tags) as well 
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