I have been going to WWDC off and on for the last 9 years and this year was the best by far. From the Swift programming language to the OS X Yosemite, to HomeKit, HealthKit, etc. It has been a lot of information to digest over the last week for features available to both developers and end users.

One thing that stood out the most to me was the overall mood from Apple. In the past, my perception from Apple was that I was living in Apple’s world and was paying for the privilege. This year seemed like a love letter to developers. A shared sense of purpose. That purpose being making great products and as a result making money. All of the Apple employees I met were very eager to help me with whatever questions I had and I ended up reporting a few bugs ( and then following up in person ).

Usually I spend most of my time in the lab area, but this year I was a bit conflicted. There was so much new stuff to go over, I spent the first few days in sessions and the later part of the week I went to the labs and got my questions answered. This year you can download the WWDC videos without needing a developer account.

After the event I always download the videos and put them on a server. I use Plex running on an old mac pro tower converted to FreeBSD. Due to Plex strange naming scheme for Tv Shows, I have created a couple of basic automator workflows that make it easier to add WWDC videos to Plex.  The WWDC Rename automator workflow just removes the .mov,- attachment extension that chrome would sometimes add to the downloaded videos and the WWDC 2014 Plex workflow just renames the files so that Plex can import them into its database properly.

WWDC_Automator_Workflows.zip

I received the following feedback email early Saturday morning:

Dear sir/madam,

I am visually impaired and use voice-over for navigation.

I have recently downloaded your up and find that it is very accessible using voice over.

The only issue I have found is that on every receipt I am having to change the currency from US dollar to British pound.

Can I not set it to British pound permanently?

Many thanks for a fantastic application.

Kinds regards.

I was very surprised to find out someone who was visually impaired was not only able to use Paperless, but also could navigate to send me a feedback email! That also made me think about how little thought I gave to accessibility. I did fix the bug this person had encountered and also cleaned up a few things that had been nagging me for awhile. I emailed this person back to let them know the fix was submitted to Apple.

While having bugs in software is common, it feels great knowing that something I created is having a positive impact (no matter how small) in someone else’s life.

I’ve been looking at Modo from Luxology ( now The Foundry since 2012 ) off and on since their 201 release ( Modo is at 701 at the time of this post). My 5 year son has to bring a box to school for his valentines day party to store all of his gifts from his classmates.

My wife suggested that we make a Minion (from the Despicable movies) but the example she wanted to use was from a website that showed a minion made from a kleenex box. So we decided to try the theme with two boxes left over from two amazon purchases.

Not entirely knowing what the end result would look like, I fired up modo and made a very simple model

The next day, we took the project in a slightly different direction while retaining most of the basic elements of the model and came up with this:

Here is the final model MinionBox_0001.lxo. I look at this as my “Hello World” for 3D modeling. It ended up being a good family project and we all have a great time making the box.

I really don’t get the point of this ad. It actually creeps me out. Not sure how the nokia 2520 fits in with a haircut

I could maybe see this as a Halloween type of ad because of the ominous music and the creepy guy with nasty fingernails, but for the christmas season? Way too damn creepy. There is nothing in this ad that encourages me to buy a Nokia tablet. 

Now compare the nokia ad to the “Misunderstood” ad from apple. Now that’s advertising!