It's that time of year again! Apple's World Wide Developer Conference begins today and tomorrow at San Francisco's Moscone Center. This will be my fourth year attending the conference, and my third year giving all or part of a developer talk (the necessary preparation for which is the main reason I haven't found time to post here in the past three weeks). I'll be giving the “Cocoa Advanced View Techniques” talk on Friday afternoon, and helping out at the developer lab Wednesday evening.

This year will mark a slight thematic shift from previous years, as Bill has noted, in that the content will be focused mainly on developing for a fully-completed version of Mac OS X (“Tiger”, in this case) that's already in end users' hands. Thus, the techniques and technologies we'll be talking about will be stuff that developers can incorporate more immediately into shipping applications, using fully implemented APIs. We're also trying out a more “hands-on” approach in many of the developer sessions this year. It will be interesting to see how that works out.

I don't yet know whether I'll try to blog during the week. A lot will depend on just how “crazy busy” I end up being (it's usually quite a whirlwind), the availability of usable wireless connections at Moscone, etc. As usual, the exact content of the sessions will be between Apple and the paying, NDA'ed developer-attendees. But since many of the technologies being discussed are already public knowledge this time around, I may be able to give some overall impressions and point out anything I find especially neat (which, of course, applies to tons of the new stuff in Tiger!).

In any case, I'm looking forward very much to the week's excitement ... beginning, as has become customary, with tomorrow morning's eagerly anticipated announcements!