Thoughts on the free WWDC videos
If you are active on twitter you probably have seen this news already but I had to take a moment to publicly thank Apple for posting the 2010 WWDC videos online for free.
Long ago these WWDC videos were done on DVD and took months and months to get out. If you attended WWDC you got them for free but could also buy them for a few hundred dollars. Over the past few years Apple has moved on to the iTunes Store for deployment, speeding up delivery and lowering the cost for non-attendees. This year they raised the bar yet again getting the majority of the videos online mere weeks after the conference and now lets anyone with an Apple Developer Account (even the free one) have access to them. This is a huge help to those of us who couldn’t make it to WWDC due to the sellout, short notice of dates (thus high airfare and hotel costs) or personal conflicts.
I’ve heard some WWDC attendees express bitterness that they paid to go to WWDC when they could have stayed home and gotten the sessions for free. While I can understand part of that frustration I have to say knowing that the sessions would always be available after the fact I would tend to spend at least half my WWDC time in the labs working with people from Apple to answer some of the more niche technical questions that pile up on my bug list. This kind of access can really pay for conference by itself. Furthermore, making the videos available for free is a huge benefit to the platform at large. Better educated developers make better apps, better apps make for a better platform.
Looking ahead I do wonder though how this will impact WWDC. Knowing that the sessions will be posted online shortly after the conference, is WWDC still worth the $1600 ticket price? One of the major issues I heard this year (not able to actually attend myself) was how crowded the conference and particularly the labs were. Perhaps knowing that the sessions are going to be published to the masses Apple could spend some resources and really flip WWDC upside down. Make the labs the star of the show and the reason you should come to WWDC. Historically the labs have been done in a pretty adhoc format (3-4 Apple developers that know technology X promise to be in lab Y for 2-4 hours) but from what I hear the crowds are really putting a strain the lack of lab organization — allowing some developers to eat up 45m of a Apple Engineer’s time while others wait in long lines and sadly sometimes leave without any help. I dunno, just brainstorming on the fly here — but I do think this is a question Apple needs to address as they make plans for WWDC 2011.
Posted on: June 18, 2010 – 3:42 PM
Hi. My name is Mike Zornek (
2 Comments
People were lining up at 8 AM every morning in order to run to the human interface lab, so they could then wait in line for over an hour to sign up (one at a time…) for a time slot. That seems like a very poor use of developers’ time, especially since the sign up period overlapped with sessions.
It would be great if they could do online lab signups next year.
I had the thought this year that they should send the conference management people to a session on Grand Central Dispatch. Hopefully some of the ideas that the OS uses to keep multicore systems busy could also be used to fill and empty big conference rooms using more than one door at a time.
In other words Jim — the interface for the interface lab sucked. :P
Thanks for the feedback.
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