Here are the items I submitted to Apple this year as feedback on the conference:

Good Stuff

• Access to Apple engineers
• Some strong speakers
• Meeting other attendees
• Being in SFO
• Beer bash here worked well
• Wireless access and power were much better this year
• Happy to see more web development focus

Suggestions

• Don’t sell so many tickets when there isn’t capacity (or pre-poll attendees on what sessions they want to attend and plan accordingly).
• Better train the center staff on crowd management–lines and arbitrary rules suck.
• Create in and out doors for each room to better move people around.
• Bring more Apple Company Store stuff here (where were those developer people? O’Reilly?).
• More drink options at lunch time (Brisk and Lemonade only are really lame).
• Food in general at lunch is poor–give us an option to pay less and just eat out every day (which is what we do anyway).
• Get session information online faster.
• Overflow rooms without video of the speaker are not the same as being there.
• Free iPhones! Seriously, though, it would be nice to offer us the chance to at least order one earlier than the general population (same goes for new hardware that may coincide with WWDC).
• Need more conference hotel space.
• Get more tech “superstars” here to speak and promote the hell out of it beforehand.
• Expand on the session descriptions so I can better plan my time.
• Would like to see more sessions on things like optimizing PHP, Apache, MySQL on OS X Server–preferably by the people who wrote them.
• Bring back the piles of junk food and Mt. Dew/Jolt from the San Jose days.
• Ozomatli was fun, but I’d never heard of them before. With the power Apple has in the music world, it would nice to be “wowed” next year–bring us Bono or Peter Gabriel or any of the other big names that like Apple.
• In a similar vein–why didn’t we get to see the new Pixar movie early? Get some more of the big entertainment houses using Apple gear to speak.

Overall, I was happy by the end of the week (after a not-so-great start). The keynote may have been a candidate for “Worst-Keynote-Ever,” but mostly it just lacked the wow factor so common in Steve’s best. Leopard will be great, but the timing of the new release for education is just plain awful. And I tend to agree with those who are still looking for a real iPhone SDK (although we should be able to do some cool things until iPhone 2).

Made it to Grand Marais yesterday to pick up the girls. I skipped out on covering the Nationwide event outside of Rochester when I found out there was a rain delay, so we basically drove non-stop to see the girls.

We ate at Sven and Ole’s for dinner, although in hindsight, I would have gone to Chez Jude (from my seven in ‘07 dining list). Turns out they are only open Tuesdays through Saturdays, so I missed my window there. Pizza at Sven and Ole’s is always good though.

For Father’s Day, I wanted to sleep in, eat chocolate-covered donuts from the World’s Best Donut Shop, eat at Chez Jude (oh well), play nine holes of golf with the kids at the Grand Marais nine-hole course, then head to the Grand Portage casino with my dad. It rained most of the day, so golf was also out.

The girls got me a couple of books–one on Everest and one on Isle Royale. We ended up eating lunch at the Angry Trout Cafe, where I tried something other than fish for the first time. The grilled chicken sandwich was very sloppy, but tasted good. Not sure where we are headed for dinner tonight…