Here are some pics from the first couple of days. More can be found at my Flickr WWDC Set.

Apptentive:

We pinged Buzz Andersen (@buzz) for his thoughts on the topic. As a long-time WWDC attendee, former SF resident and established food and drink connoisseur we knew he’d have a great set of recommendations for us. We’re sad he won’t be making the trip this year but we’ll frequent a few of his favorite haunts in his honor.

If you are lucky enough to be attending WWDC, make time to explore one of the most beautiful cities in North America. It would be a shame to make the trip and not see at least some of the sites San Francisco has to offer. If you are a WWDC/San Francisco veteran, let us know your favorite spots and things to do in the comments.

The Verge:

We’ve already seen a number of renders of Apple Campus 2 — the company’s proposed “spaceship” campus — that show what it will look like from the outside. Of particular interest, though, is what’s going on beneath the surface — the campus will include a four level basement that features an auditorium and 4,300 parking spaces. The building has yet to be approved by the city, but if it does Apple is hoping to have it ready for some time in 2015.

Bloomberg Businessweek:

Steve Jobs always oversaw Apple’s blockbuster product launches, but he was never a one-man show. Phil Schiller, the company’s longtime senior vice president of product marketing, often hammed it up onstage as the lower-brow counterweight to Apple’s cool, polished chief executive officer.Offstage, Schiller wasn’t a clown but one of Jobs’s most trusted, influential lieutenants. He helped Apple’s late CEO work through the meat-and-potatoes of creating new products: Defining target markets, determining technical specs, setting prices. It was Schiller who came up with the spin-wheel interface on the original iPod, and he was a champion of the iPad when other executives questioned its potential.Since Jobs’s death in October, perhaps no Apple executive other than CEO Tim Cook is under more pressure to fill the void.

Schiller may play the clown onstage but everyone who knows him knows he’s a pitbull when it comes to Apple.

TBWA/Chiat/Day’s Lee Clow, the advertising genius behind the “Think Different” and “1984” advertisements, sums up his relationship with Steve Jobs.

TIME:

…In 1992, nobody had a PDA. That’s Personal Digital Assistant, in case you’ve forgotten, and even though nobody had one, lots of people were talking about them. Apple CEO John Sculley had coined the term in the keynote speech he made at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 7. He announced that Apple would release PDAs–pocket-sized information devices, easier to use than a PC and selling for under $1000–in 1993.

Twenty years ago this week, on May 29, 1992, Sculley spoke again at another CES, in Chicago. This time, he didn’t just talk about PDAs. He brought one with him. It was a Newton, a prototype of the device which Apple planned to start selling in early 1993. Actually, Apple had multiple Newtons on hand that, which was good: The first one it unveiled on stage had dead batteries and didn’t work. Using a second unit, Steve Capps, one of Newton’s creators, showed how you could use it to order a pizza by moving topping icons onto a pie and then sending out a fax. In 1992, that was show-stopping stuff.

Newton’s were the must-have geek toy of the Nineties. It may not seem like it now but they were amazing for their time.

Jeremy Allaire, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Brightcove:

Apple will not anytime soon launch a competitive subscription video product to cable.(but)…the iPhone and iPad in your pocket or handbag is the next-generation TV set-top box, and it is both highly personal and highly social and capable of bringing hundreds of thousands and soon millions of rich interactive applications and experiences onto your TV set.Apple will release a new Apple TV add-on product, though I expect that rather than using the current “puck” design it will instead be a thin black bar, perhaps 1 inch tall and 3 inches wide, that can easily mount to the top of almost any existing HD capable TV set. Like the existing Apple TV, it will have HDMI and power jacks on the back, but it will also include a high-def camera built into its face, as well as an embedded iOS environment that provides motion sensing and speech processing.

Very interesting analysis and, I believe, almost exactly the way Apple’s future on your television will be.

AllThingsD:

Tim Cook learned a lot from Steve Jobs, and one of the big takeaways seems to be: Don’t tip your hand. The Apple CEO was unwilling to tackle questions about any future product plans during his first appearance on the D10 stage Wednesday night.

Mashable:

Steve Jobs may have built Apple into the world’s most valuable technology company in part by betting against the web. But global celebrities and some of the Internet’s brightest stars joined together to create a heartfelt tribute video honoring the legendary entrepreneur during Monday night’s Webby Awards in New York City.

Barack Obama, Bono and Sarah Silverman were among roughly a dozen celebrities and political figures to appear in the video thanking Jobs for his company’s role in changing the technology world and everyday life for millions upon millions of digitally savvy consumers.

Reuters:

The chief executives of Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd are used to running the show at their global tech empires, but they will be in for a different experience when they arrive at a San Francisco federal courthouse on Monday.Apple’s Tim Cook and Samsung’s Choi Gee-sung, whose companies are embroiled in bitter patent litigation, have been instructed by a federal judge to appear for court-supervised mediation. A joint court filing in April said that “as directed by the Court, Apple and Samsung are both willing to participate” in the discussions. In other words, it was not exactly their idea.

I wonder if the judge will make them hug it out?

Variety:

Sony Pictures has tapped its Oscar-winning “Social Network” scribe Aaron Sorkin to adapt “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson’s bestselling biography of the late Apple co-founder.Sorkin, who earned an Oscar for adapting Ben Mezrich’s Facebook tome “The Accidental Billionaires,” previously wrote “Moneyball” for the studio. His other feature credits include the politically-themed trio “Charlie Wilson’s War,” “The American President” and “A Few Good Men,” as well as “Malice.”

This announcement alone guarantees the movie will be better than anything Ashton Kutcher stars in.