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?