Well...here I am after the WWDC, waiting for my 7am flight out of SFO. What did I learn?

Apple is switching to Intel processors. This should just plain not matter to the average user (although all of the usual pundits are desperately trying to make it matter. Lets face it: your mother doesn't care whether her computer has a G5 PowerPC or a Pentium, as long as it works. And Apple is going to extraordinary lengths to make sure it will work, from adding a PowerPC translation layer (Rosetta), universal binaries (so that devleopers can deliver one binary for both processors) and just making it really really simple for developers to transition.

It doesn't matter, except that we'll likely see (eventually) somewhat faster systems (notably in Apple's laptop offerings). Should this stop you from buying a Mac now if you were already planning to? Probably not. Lets face it, two years from now your processor would likely have been outdated already, regardless of the switch.

Interesting note: you know you're getting old when the Apple guys felt they needed to spend 15 minutes explaining what big endian and little endian means. And only you and a few other people seemed to be bored during the explanation.

Recommended reading on the transition: Going for Broke

Dashboard turns out to be Apple's attempt at a personal "portal". Remember portals? They were going to take over the world, oh, back in 2000 or so. They didn't. Dashboard is prettier though than portals we've seen in the past but will still suffer from the usual portal-ly problems like lack of useful content and broken plugins (i.e. widgets) as developers rediscover the inherent problems of screen-scraping HTML content. Widgets are, however, extremely easy to write, and the widget framework is very friendly to such tasks as running a shell script or command line executable and wrapping the output in a pretty UI.

Spotlight will eventually make hierarchy folder structures obsolete. This isn't just my prediction. There's no excuse for any application not to provide a spotlight plugin for their document types. It's just that easy to write one.

I learned how to make an application installer. It's easy. Sadly, there's no uninstall. Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.

The WebKit technology is simply amazing, especially with the Tiger additions like WebArchives. These guys produce really well thought out technologies.

My personal pet peeves from the conference (and from most conferences I've attended):

• people who walk around a densely crowded show floor with open, full cups of coffee. The lids are there for a reason. You will spill the thing all over yourself and probably some others when some other situationally unaware developer type slams into you.
• people who insist on sitting on the edges of the rows of seats while the rest of the row is empty. You aren't so important that you need a quick escape after the session. Really. I mean it. No one likes climbing over you to get a seat and you'll probably get an open cup of coffee dumped on you.

It was a fun conference.