Yesterday I finally arrived back in Austin after 8 days in California. Last weekend started off with a trip to Los Angeles, where I met up with my old friend Justin and attended “2D Expo”, a conference sponsored by ASIFA-Hollywood for traditional animators. The conference was great, and I left feeling pretty energized. There is an opportunity right now for traditional animation to leave its Disney roots and break new ground. I met some great people and had fun talking about the industry and what comes next. Hope to be back to the LA area one of these days.
On Sunday morning, Justin picked me up from Burbank and we drove north on highway 1, which hugs the coastline all the way to San Francisco. We stopped at a few random scenic points, a nice restaurant overlooking the water, and at Big Sur. A healthy couple mile walk through Chinatown and dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf rounded out the evening.
Monday through Friday was Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference. At work we sent 5 people, so we had pretty good coverage of all the interesting sessions. As usual the keynote was not to be missed. I’ve yet to see a Steve Jobs' demo that wasn’t effective. The first time I saw him was the Macworld Expo after he came back to Apple (but before he took over), and he even managed to make a NeXTSTEP demo look impressive. Contrary to what many people believed at the introduction to Mac OS X, Apple’s new OS is not just NeXT-based; it’s about a third NeXT, a third classic Mac OS, and a third something entirely new. That last third really shines in Tiger.
