“As he has for each of the past 14 years, Andrew Stone woke at 3:45 on the morning of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on June 6 in San Francisco, grabbed his yoga mat, and joined the queue of techies waiting to be let in for Steve Jobs’s 10 a.m. presentation,” Peter Burrows reports for Businessweek. “The gangly Stone, a former architect who has written software for Jobs’s machines since the 1980s, revels in talking tech with fellow Apple geeks, particularly the Europeans and Asians who often save a night’s hotel fare by spending the night in line.”
“This year, more than ever, the good mood was powered by something other than camaraderie: Developers are making money, getting lots of contract work,” Burrows reports. “‘You have no idea how many people around here are overjoyed,’ says Stone, 55, who flew up from his home in Albuquerque the day before. He recalls far leaner years, when many struggled to come up with the $3,000 or so for the conference fee and travel. ‘Now, good developers can make almost as much money as they want.'”
Burrows reports, “The scene outside the conference hall is a snapshot of the war Apple is waging for the hearts and minds of developers. The scale and diversity of Apple’s app universe—425,000, roughly twice as many as Android’s—is a big reason consumers have purchased more than 200 million iPads, iPhones, and iPod touches. In his WWDC talk, Jobs laid out a post-PC vision of online services that will open up vast opportunities for programmers to come up with new kinds of software. “We’re going to demote the PC and the Mac to be just another device,” Jobs told the crowd. “We’re going to move the hub of your digital life to the cloud.” He announced a new service, iCloud, that will ensure any photo, music, or other file that is downloaded or changed on your iPhone is automatically, wirelessly synched to any of your other Apple devices and vice versa.”
Much more in the full article here.
[Attribution: The San Francisco Chronicle]