The Rock

Friday was our last day at the Apple conference and we finished off with sessions on the iPhone and podcasting. Apple provide an end-to-end solution and many organisations, including the BBC, use Apple products to release their content online. These sessions, along with all the others, have made the conference extremely worthwhile and we will return home having achieved our trip objectives and having learned a lot more about Apple products and technology.

There will be a number of meetings with Invest NI, Digital Circle and Apple in the coming weeks to discuss how BMC can progress delivering Apple based classes and certification to our own students and to the local Digital Media sector - so in some ways the work is only beginning.

The picture, of course, is of Alcatraz - not our hotel in San Francisco, which was great! Alcatraz was, amongst other things, a federal prison until 1963 and is now one of the most visited attractions in the USA. We got some time on Friday afternoon to do some sightseeing and the hour long boat trip around the Bay and under the Golden Gate bridge was fantastic. All work and no play...

CAKE

The Apple conference bash was held on Thursday evening in Yerba Buena Gardens. This event was another opportunity to informally meet up with delegates from the Invest NI trip, along with others from around the world, and discuss how we could apply what we had learned to our own contexts. Being at the conference with representatives from various sectors within Northern Ireland has been incredibly beneficial - particularly, as we consider how we can develop classes to teach iPhone development (and other Apple technologies) to our existing students and, also, how we can continue to best meet the needs of local industry.

Of course, being a bash, there were plenty of refreshments on hand and the band Apple had secured were appropriately named CAKE, an American indie band from California.

iEducation

Sessions for us on Wednesday focused mainly on displaying content and creating applications on the iPod Touch and the iPhone. There have been over 40 million of these devices sold so far and over 50,000 applications have been developed just within the last year – many of which are free to download and use. As you would expect, educators from around the globe have been investigating how to harness this technology for education – in terms of management, teaching and learning. Examples range from using it to remotely access the college's Information Systems e.g. to allow a student/staff member to query details about a course, to developing applications which use the device as the primary delivery channel of the learning experience. Another interesting development over the last number of months is the increasing popularity of iTunesU which allows teachers to place content on iTunes. Students can then either watch it online or download it and play it on their iPod or other portable device. The obvious advantage that this has over using other online delivery mechanisms is that students are very familiar with the iTunes software and it provides them with a single portal for all their media – both entertainment and educational.

A key event for us on Wednesday evening, and indeed our trip, was the special education gathering organised by Apple. This invitation-only event brought together practitioners and Apple Education staff from all over the world and we had the opportunity to talk at length with those involved in many of the developments we had heard about over the week, including iStanford. One of our key goals for the trip had been to explore how BMC could get involved with Apple's iPhone Developer University Program in order to offer classes within our full-time and part-time course portfolio. The gathering afforded us the opportunity to discuss this directly with Apple and we had a great response - and an action plan to pursue upon our return.

All about Design

In order to gain as much as possible from the programme on Tuesday, we each attended different seminars covering a range of topics: graphics, iPhone development, game development, browser technology, Web applications and emerging Web standards. Each of these relate to core elements of BMC multimedia provision and the sessions illustrated what can be achieved when creativity and technical skill fuse with class leading hardware and software. The seminars also reinforced to us the importance of ensuring that we continue to provide industry informed curriculum and technologies to our students. This is vital in order to facilitate their successful entry into this dynamic and ever changing creative sector and, also, to support their professional development as they progress through their careers.

In the early afternoon, we, along with colleagues from QUB and UUJ, met senior Apple education representatives in order to discuss current and proposed provision within Northern Ireland FE and HE. We also explored the support that Apple could provide, as we deliver the best curriculum to multimedia learners and support our local Digital Media industries.

The Apple Design Awards took place on Tuesday evening and we were treated with viewing the amazing work done by both student and professional developers. The winners' products ranged from simple games and applications to all-encompassing productivity tools but, as you would imagine, all exhibited a common characteristic – a beautifully clean and intuitive design created to maximise the user's experience. Each of these may, one day, be recognised as a design classic - just like the Mini pictured. Of course, this being an Apple conference, that Mini is no normal rental car. Rather it is one that can be located, booked and paid for all through the convenience of your iPhone and when you locate it, using your on-phone GPS,  you can even open the doors remotely.

Monday Morning

Monday morning found us queueing to get into the keynote address - along with around 5,500 other conference delegates. We had left our hotel at around 7am for the 10am start but only managed to be in positions 1004-1006 in the line! As the queue moved into the building, we did get breakfast - provided by Apple - and once seated in the enormous auditorium, we 'experienced' the famous address along with our fellow delegates, a thousand Apple staff and a bank of world media. The address which you can see here, concentrated on the new Mac laptops, the new Mac OS and the new iPhone. For me, the most interesting part of the event came when iPhone development companies came to present how they were exploiting the iPhone in their own fields – from breathtaking games, to handheld laboratories for education, to mobile monitors for life-saving hospital equipment which allow doctors to follow a patient's condition from anywhere in the world. Irrespective of the brand, it's amazing to see how quickly computationally intensive processing is becoming mobile and that the range of applications appears limitless.

The keynote lasted around two hours and in the afternoon we attended a seminar on Apple's Objective-C programming language – which I remembered from QUB almost 20 years ago when Computer Science had a lab of Next machines, famous for their multimedia capability and use of a version of the Unix OS called NextStep.

This was followed by an excellent session where Stanford University detailed how they had utilised the iPhone, along with other mobile devices, to allow the students to access all University information on the move – from their football team's last result to where the next class is and when. They call it iStanford. From the audience questions, it's clear that UK based universities and colleges are moving towards this also and gave us, from BMC, plenty of things to think about for the week ahead...how does iBMC sound?

Streets of San Francisco

We arrived in San Francisco at 1pm (9pm GMT) on Friday following our 19 hour trip. Quite a number of our fellow passengers were also destined for the conference - some of whom we already knew whilst others were easily identified via their iPhone/iPod and MacBook combo. There is a real buzz about iPhone development at the moment and it seems that most people we meet are developing multimedia content and/or applications for it - so there will be ample opportunity to investigate ways in which we may be able use this exciting technology.

Upon our arrival, the time difference allowed us to book into our hotel and then do some initial exploring. The city richly deserves its reputation as being the 'Paris of the West' with is stunning architecture, spectacular views, and fascinating history. We'll have a good chance to look about more over the weekend and prepare ourselves for the week ahead.

Only a few days to go...

This blog will record the visit of BMC Multimedia staff (Jonathan Heggarty, Darin Smyth and Christian McGilloway) to the 2009 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference in California, which takes place between 8th - 12th June. The trip has been organised by Invest NI and over thirty delegates from academia and industry will spend a packed week attending lectures, seminars and hands-on lab sessions at the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco.
During our visit, we'll hear of Apple's latest hardware (iPhone, iPod, iMacs etc.), latest software (OS X, iLife, Garageband etc.) and we'll take classes given by some of the company's top developers. We'll also have plenty of time to meet educators from around the globe and learn and share best practice with them. The week starts off with the keynote speech - the one at which the new products will be announced - which is at 10am. The only problem is you have to queue from 7am to get a seat...