WWDC 2015 Happy Hour Round Up

The Smile Team made it to WWDC this year, and to the other two conferences in SF the same week. We’re looking forward to what iOS 9 and El Capitan will bring later this year, as are you.

Here’s what our developer on the ground, Éric, noticed from within the walls of WWDC:

There was a palpable sense of relief when talking to most of the developers at the conference after they took stock of the keynote announcements. Indeed, it seems that this year’s OS releases are a bit less about broad and sweeping changes such as iOS 7’s UI redesign or last year’s addition of a multitude of OS extension mechanisms and more about incremental refinements of the platforms. While there were still plenty of exciting new features and announcements to be found (split-screen multitasking support for the iPad, system-wide Search API on iOS, a revamped and much-improved Notes application, Swift 2 going open source), it seemed that there’s going to be a little more breathing room for developers to keep pace with Apple’s platform advancements this year.

Dub-Dub was not the only game in town. We helped sponsor the free alternative conference altConf for another year. It was bigger and better than ever, with two speaker tracks and room for 1000 people. As the wrap session said, this conference isn’t just to make better devs, it’s to make better people. There are conferences to make you better at CoreData and Swift and Playgrounds, and then there are conferences that remind you why you do what you do and to stoke that passion for another year. We, and others who support AltConf, believe you need both. Yet another conference joined Dub-Dub week, Layers the design conference. As MC and conference co-founder Jessie Char said, this conference was all about hearing from her favorite designers while eating all her favorite foods. Plus new-version Photoshop sneak peaks. To misquote her further, who doesn’t love that?

(PS, did you know that 3-D printed designer glasses while you wait is a thing? The future is now.)

WWDC is not just a time to watch sessions and learn the new stuff as quickly as possible, but to meet new friends and catch up with old ones.

Peter Cohen (iMore) and Kelly Guimont (Smile).

Greg Scown (Smile) and Bob Cantoni (Nice Mohawk) former Smile-er.

Florian Albrecht (Elgato) and Maia Olson (Smile).

App Camp 4 Girls had a successful party to start off Camp 3.0 Indiegogo campaign. Take a page from the App Camp play book if you want to keep your crowd engaged. Play Social Bingo so that everyone asks around to see who plays guitar and who flew in from Canada.

To finish off the week, on Conference Day 5, we had a Smile Team wrap party. This is one of the few times a year a large group of get together.

(Éric, Angel, Yunor, Kelly, Maia, Grey, Philip)

Hope you enjoyed happy hour. We had pizza and caipiranas. Now, we’re off to make PDFpen and TextExpander ready for the fall OSs.