C4 Followup

A great time was had at C4 this past weekend. My trip started out Friday when I met up with John before the conference. I haven’t seen him since this past June, so it was great to hang out again. We went to this excellent Chinese food restaurant, and he showed me around the area a bit that afternoon.

The conference kicked off Friday evening with Wolf giving an introduction and Gruber following up with what was almost a UI state of the union address. After that everyone piled into a couple of busses to head over to Jaks. There I got a chance to talk with Elliot, who has been beta testing Seasonality now for almost a year. He’s working on a new add-on feature for Seasonality that I’ll post more about later.

Saturday kept the ball rolling with some excellent presentations by Brent, Aaron, Gus, Steve, and Brian. Brent talked about web services, and dropped a few references to Seasonality during his presentation (thanks Brent!). Gus gave a great introduction to Lua, which looks like an awesome embed-able scripting language. I’m toying with the idea of adding Lua support in Seasonality. Aaron gave some tips on how to get started with Cocoa and talked about going after the enterprise market. Steve talked about the programming language he created, Io, and how it handles concurrent programming, which was pretty cool. Finally, Brian gave a pretty good overview of Subversion and where the project is going in the near (and far) future.

All this great content was concluded with a panel led by DB. Several topics came up during the talk, like suggestions to Apple from the independent developer standpoint, what technologies and frameworks are under/over utilized, and of course some shouting over DRM. Afterwards everyone headed over to Gino’s for some grub. Speaking of grub, the food at this conference was much better than WWDC. Jamba Juice was brought in Saturday afternoon, plenty of caffeine was available at all times, and the other meals were excellent.

Since the content of this conference isn’t under NDA like Apple’s WWDC is, there were a lot more people taking photos of the sessions and events. You can check out my photos here. John Gruber got a shot of me looking like I’m about to attack. I look a lot friendlier in a photo James Duncan Davidson took of the audience.

Thanks go out to Wolf for doing an excellent job of putting the conference together. Here’s hoping for a C4 2.0 next year.