As I reported here earlier, Apple has been so generous as to offer me a student scholarship for their most outstanding developers conference next week. It’s my first WWDC, so I’m pretty excited and I can’t wait to arrive in San Francisco on saturday evening. For sunday I planned to attend WWDC student sunday, but since this has been moved to monday this year, I’ll try to get a good look at the largest gorilla crowd I’ve ever witnessed at the Great Gorilla Run and you’ll find me at sfMacIndie later that day.

Not only is this my first WWDC, though, it’s also the first time at all I’m in the US, so I’ll happily take advice on which of their beers are safe for a german to drink in exchange for one of said beers. If you’d like to talk to me without drinking beer, that would also be more or less fine, just let me know. My favorite topics include application updates, bluetooth proximity detection, dropping out of college and becoming a pirate, iTunes alarms, the lack of autobahn speed limits and lots more.

PS: Why only why did Apple need to release MBPs so close to WWDC that my placed-at-lightspeed order by far won’t make it to my doorstep before I leave for WWDC? That’s mean!

PPS: You should definitely check out this widget, though. Just so you know how late your order will be.

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Woohoo! I guess I’m going to WWDC07! Thanks, Apple!

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Development of Home Zone and Aurora has slowed lately, as I’m currently busy with an internship at Mindquarry, among other not-yet-public things. Mindquarry is a quite young startup, founded by MSc graduates of Potsdam’s HPI (where I’m currently an undergraduate student) and funded by Hasso Plattner Ventures. The company is developing web-based collaboration tools for small to medium teams to share their files, track their tasks, manage a wiki and more. If you’re thinking “hey, that sounds like what 37signals is doing”, you’re certainly not wrong, but this is a seriously enterprisey Cocoon-based approach which is licensed under the MPL. Luckily, I got assigned to work on a native Mac client to replace their Java SWT client (yuck! I completely agree with Jens Alfke) for synchronizing files and having a quick way to check tasks. To get an impression of my workplace, check my corresponding Flickr photoset.

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So… I finally decided to start blogging. I started a few attempts some time ago, but back then I never really had something to talk about. Aurora (and myself being a Mac developer for some time now) definitely changed that. I feel that this blog might be a nice way to talk about my motivations in writing Aurora, let you peek into the future of Aurora and – quite importantly, I think – to give the users of Aurora a central place to talk about their favorite rooster replacement that awakens them every morning.

Let me also use this opportunity to thank everyone who is using Aurora, told me how much they liked it, or – even better – donated to the project. It’s great that Aurora has built up such a nice user base since the first public release in March and I’m certain that we can continue this positive trend. The next release of Aurora will have some nice new features and will be released before Christmas!

But I hope I won’t just talk about Aurora. There are other interesting things going on in the Mac software universe that I might want to talk about, although I’m glad the MacHeist is almost over and I don’t have to talk about that.

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