chanson

The time is upon us once again — WWDC time!

As I have the past few years, I'll be in San Francisco all week, staying at the Hotel Kabuki in Japantown.

And of course, I'll be around the conference all week — especially in the labs. Come by and say hi, and I'll be happy to help with any questions you have!

I'd like to make it to NSCoder Night tonight, but I just have too much else to do today — again.

I won't be seeing anyone at NSCoder Night next week, either, as I'll be in San Francisco for the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference! If you're attending, be sure to find me and say hi!

It's WWDC time again for all of us in the Macintosh universe. I'm going to be up in San Francisco all week — if you've ever wanted to meet me, and you're at WWDC, this is your opportunity!

This year, instead of staying right across the border from Crackville, I'm staying at the Miyako in Japantown where JTAF is traditionally held. It's quite relaxing, though it's far enough out from Moscone West that I'll be taking a cab to the conference.

I titled this "Xcode 2.1: WebObjects 5.3 Development" for a reason:

Xcode 2.1, included with every copy of Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger, comes with the WebObjects development tools, including a new version of the WebObjects Builder HTML application design tool and a new Xcode designer for Enterprise Objects.

Yes, that's right. Free in Xcode 2.1.

In case anyone hasn't noticed, Xcode 2.1 shipped at WWDC on Monday. It includes a whole slew of new features. First and foremost is, of course, Intel support. Lots of people have said a whole lot about this so I won't repeat it here.

The new feature that will have the most significant and immediate impact on developers' lives is the switch from build styles to configurations.

In Xcode 2.0 and earlier, a build style was a collection of project-level settings that were overlaid on the settings for all targets in the project. For example, if you specified OTHER_CFLAGS="-DFOO=1" in a build style and OTHER_CFLAGS="-DFOO=0" in a target, the build style would take precedence when it was active and the compiler would be passed "-DFOO=0".

This was confusing: Build styles were edited by inspecting the target, and the OTHER_CFLAGS entry in the target settings showed up with a strikethrough when it was overridden in the active build style. This also caused problems for some developers who didn't want settings from build styles overlaid on all targets in a project, and they particularly didn't want settings from a build style in a project to override settings in targets in subprojects.

Configurations in Xcode 2.1 are just collections of settings. Settings in a target configuration override settings in the matching project configuration. Also, target configurations are by default self-contained, while project configurations default to being empty, which means by default you don't have to worry about overriding at all. What's more, configurations are applied by name when building subprojects — settings in the project you're building don't override subproject settings.

Editing build settings in Xcode 2.1 is a lot like editing build settings in Xcode 2.0 and earlier: You just select a target or the project and bring up its inspector, and build settings show up in the Build tab. You can select a configuration to edit, and you can even edit all configurations at once. This is very, very useful — often most of the settings for a target will be identical across Debug and Release configurations. The ones that aren't show up in a mixed state.

(Did you notice I referred to Debug and Release configurations? That's because Development and Deployment have been retired.)

You can even specify that a configuration is based on a text file of key/value pairs with the ".xcconfig" extension. So if you have collections of settings that you want to standardize on — for example, a suite of compiler error and warning flags — you can store them in files and check them into your source code control system separately from any projects. You can even copy or drag directly from the target/project inspector in Xcode and paste or drop in an xcconfig file!

WWDC 2005 is over, and damn was it a great week! Apple made some incredible announcements and shipped some incredible software, I got to see lots of old friends and make a lot of new ones, and I got to talk to lots of developers about things that I'm passionate about: Core Data, unit testing, setting up and streamlining your build process, and creating insanely great software to make users' lives better.

It was a wonderful, wonderful time. Thanks to everyone!

There's this WWDC thing going on starting today. I'll be around, look for me and say hi or something.

Just so everyone knows, here are my travel plans.

I'm going to be at MacHack in Dearborn, Michigan next week. I'll be staying at the Holiday Inn Fairlane, which is the conference hotel for MacHack. I'll be there from the night of Tuesday, June 17, 2003 and I'll be leaving very early the morning of Sunday, June 22, 2003.

The week after MacHack, I'm going to be at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. I'll be staying at the Argent downtown, right by the Moscone Center. That's the hotel Apple has some sort of deal with for the conference. I'll be arriving late in the evening on Sunday, June 22, 2003 and I'll be flying home on Sunday, June 29, 2003.

After that, who knows where I'm going to be? Maybe I'll get to travel around some more, I'm finding I like it when I get to go to interesting places or be around interesting people. And as long as I have high-speed Internet access and a steady flow of projects...

Eric Norlin, DIDW -- final preparations [via Doc Searls], I *doubt* that you'll find another show this year as wired and blogged out as we'll be (maybe PopTech! -- i'll be interested to see). As far as I know, we're breaking new ground....not only will we have the whole damn place wi-fi'd for like a 5 block area, but we're also providing an RSS aggregator that folks can sign up for to have their blogs linked in the feed.....

They may not have been as large, and they may not have been "blogged out," but both WWDC and MacHack have extensive wireless Ethernet coverage. MacHack has had it since 1998. The aggregator idea is pretty cool, though. Maybe we can set one of those up at MacHack this year. But people will probably be too busy coding to write extensively in their weblogs.

MacHack is an incredible conference. I've been going since 1994 (though I had to take 1996 and 1997 off). If you're developing Macintosh software, you owe it to yourself to attend.

I'm going to be in San Jose, CA from May 5 to May 12 for the Apple World Wide Developer Conference. I'll be staying at the Fairmont in downtown San Jose.

I should go to Apple's World-Wide Developer Conference again this year. I want to. I'm just trying to work out all the costs.

Grr. Why is everything so damn expensive? It's not the conference itself that concerns me, it's the hotel price.

Oh, and a boot to the head to Apple for hiring some company to run a consolidated hotel reservation web site (with extra-special conference room rates) that I can't use on Mac OS X. It has some stupid Java applet so they can show little pushpins where hotels that match search criteria are. It doesn't work in either OmniWeb 4.1sp57 or Internet Explorer 5.1.3. I bet if I wrote the company, I'd get email back saying crap like "Do you have the latest Java plug-in from Sun? What version of Windows does MAC include anyway?"