technicality discrimination: WWDC 2013 Day 1

I lined up at 2am for the WWDC 2013 keynote. It was early, it was cold. But there were great people in line to talk with and the time passed surprisingly fast. Marc Gurman was there, as was Adam Bell, Grant Paul (chpwn), Marc Edwards, the Nickelfish crew, and many, many others. But that was just the beginning...!

Due to new security procedures -- bag checks -- they let us in earlier than in years before, but that just meant lining up inside after out. There were a couple of additional banners up, but covered in black cloth. Secrets!

We finally got in around 9:30pt, half an hour before the event was scheduled to begin, and I raced to get ready. Seth Clifford was handling the live blogging and I was taking photos. I was shooting with a Canon 5D Mark III and 70-200mm Sigma lens, which I'd accidentally dropped the night before. Luckily only the UV filter shattered and the camera worked fine. Unluckily, I lost my miniUSB cable so I could shoot tethered. That meant I had to shoot a series of pictures, swap cards, start importing in Aperture, export, drag into the Live Blog, and keep shooting with the other card. It was sub-optimal but it worked.

After the keynote the curtains were pulled on the new banners -- OS X Mavericks and the MacBooks, and new Mac Pros were available to be stared at.

I went to the State of the Union. That's the second keynote, and the on that's under NDA which means I can't talk about what was said there. (If you violate NDA's, you're not doing Apple, this business, or yourself any favors.) I can say there was some amazing, and some very candid things shown and discussed there.

Then it was time for the iMore + Debug + Iterate party. We wanted to podcast right after the event so we could bring you all our thoughts and feelings while they were still fresh. We also wanted to thank all the incredible guests we'd had on the shows for the past two years, and honor both our 2012 and 2013 iMore Hall of Fame winners, so we decided to throw a small party. Jessie Char from Pacific Helm was kind enough to handle all the heavy lifting for us. We had some great guests on as well, and we'll post both the video and audio soon.

After that I spent some time with some very, very smart people deconstruction all the events of the day, and pouring over iOS 7 by the pixel and bit. So much has changed, and so much seems unfinished, that I'm still working on collecting my thoughts.

But I'll have a full iOS 7 first impressions article for everyone very soon.

Thanks for reading all our coverage so far, and if there's anything else you'd like to see - or just see more of -- let me know right now!