Today is the first day of the World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, California. With over 5,000 people in attendance, this is one of the largest WWDC’s yet.

The House That Steve Built has some exciting announcements that have been coming seemingly every minute. Among the highlights are for the first half of the day are:

- Not only is iPhone 2.0 in beta with over 4,000 people in the beta program, but that there will be three parts to the SDK: Enterprise, SDK, as well as new features for the end users.

- Several demos from SEGA, Apple, eBay, Pangea Software, MIMVista, among others.

- SEGA shows off a video of Super Monkey Ball, which will be a launch title in the new App Store for $9.99 USD.

- MIMVista shows off a program designed to help medical students study and learn various parts of the body with almost realistic images.

- Steve anounces new iPhone 2.0 features, including contact search, support for Microsoft Office documents, and support for Asian languages. The iPhone is set to be released July 11th.

- Mobile.Me is the replacement for .mac, current .mac subscribers will be automatically updated to the new service. A 60-day trial of Mobile.Me will be included with the iPhone 2.0.

- The new iPhone will be thiner, sexier, include support for a 3G network, Enterprise support, more affordable, available in more countries, and have advanced GPS support.

- Target price for an 8GB iPhone 2.0 will be $199, a savings of $200 over the current price of the iPhone.

- Later in the day, Mac OS X 10.6, Snow Leopard was announced, but would feature no new features, only improvements over older ones.

So we arrived and are waiting in line. The queue is rather long and we’re not sure if we managed to catch a good position for the Keynote. That is, a position that prevents us from having to enter one of the overflow rooms. There’re definately lots of people here. 

One of the lab areas in the lab room still had it’s label coverted. That may be a cue by that there’ll be something new which enforces a new lab in order to understand it.

More news as we continue our approaching the main floor.

On May 30th, the Blender Institute released its first movie, “Big Buck Bunny” on its website in .avi, H.264, .m4v, and several other video formats and resolutions.

The DVD has been available since May 20th, ten days before its wide release on the web.

The film follows the “Big Buck Bunny” as he thwarts three nefarious woodland creatures (2 squirrels and a rat) bent on causing mischief.

As mentioned in an earlier posting, Big Buck Bunny was created using Blender and other free and open source programs, and as such, is itself released under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Source: www.bigbuckbunny.org

So tomorrow our journey to WWDC will begin. We’ll fly from Amsterdam to London, from London to L.A. and from there by car to San Francisco. So it’ll be a rather eventfull journey: An interesting ride from L.A to SF, a (hopefully) equally interesting KeyNote (Please no ‘Worst Keynote Ever’ shirts for sale afterwards, like last year) and lots of informative sessions.

I got a new battery for my 15″ MBP in order to be able to hack away on some projects while on plane, I updated my harddive to 200MB 7200rpm so it is faster and I have more storage for a plethora of data (maybe even a Snow Leopard Install?) and I collected lots of documents to read while on plane too.

I’m really looking forward to it. If you happen to visit WWDC and’d love to meet up, be sure to contact us. Especially if you’re german too, and’d love to meet some other german MacHeads / Cococa Hackers.

Isolator is a rather simple Freeware application that helps you gaining focus through covering everything on your screen except for the task at hand. This allows to concentrate on what you’re doing instead of repeated distractions by means of IM, Twitter, Mail or others.