My theory:

Apple is constantly doing cell triangulation in the background. These locations are stored in ‘consolidated.db’ along with a timestamp. They are used for the significant location change API.

I say it’s just cell triangulation because the points recorded aren’t exactly where you’ve been. There is also a column in the database for the ‘HorizontalAccuracy’. This never falls below 500 (meters presumably) in my file and is often higher. I have one point that has an error of 79130m!

Questions

Why are there no points at my home or work? I spend all day there!

Cell triangulation isn’t very accurate. I would guess that inside, cell triangulation puts you all over the place. It would be interesting to see the error circles around each point. This would make things a little more clear.

Why is Apple keeping a complete history?

Engineers over-engineer. They’d rather be safe than introduce a bug. It’s a lot easier to keep all the data than to purge it.

What if they’re cell tower locations as suggested by this article?

Why would Apple be tracking cell tower locations. That wouldn’t make sense. They know where the cell towers are.

I doubt there’s anything malicious going on here. Just a solution to a problem that failed to take into account how insane people are about location information.

My predictions for iBooks:

1. There will be an iPhone version.
2. You will be able to drop in your own books.

There will be an iPhone version.

This one seems like a no brainer, yet no one has mentioned it. If you want a successful books store, distribute your portal to as many customers as you can. 30,000,000 people is a good starting point. By decoupling the iBooks store from the system software on the iPad, they are free to produce a truly universal binary that contains an iPhone version and an iPad version.

You will be able to drop in your own books.

Apple allows iPad apps to put documents in a certain directory which will be mounted on your computer when the iPad is plugged in. I’m predicting that all the books will go in there. The books bought from Apple will be DRM protected, but iBooks will work with any ePub book without DRM.

We’ll know more in 44 days. Do I really have to wait?

There is nothing more special than the big names in your favorite sub-culture getting together in one square block. WWDC is just that.

Let me just take a moment to be thankful for this amazing event…

There is nothing more special than the big names in your favorite sub-culture getting together in one square block. WWDC is just that.

I have been to two WWDCs and this is by far the best. Of course, next years will be the best because they just keep getting better and better.

Let us walk through the days, shall we?

Weekend

Got my sightseeing out of the way. Went to all the usuals like golden gate bridge/park. I went to the Haight street fair on Sunday which was great as usual. It was an unbelievably nice day so I ate fair food in the park. In the evening I went to the Indie Dev Soirée and met up with development acquaintances. Free food FTW.

Monday

The keynote was good. They actually let the students into the main keynote this time, although I didn’t really mind last year being in the overflow room. I end up looking at the monitors in the main room anyway, so what’s the difference?

After all the state of the unions I went and met with a company about doing some work for them during the summer. I told them I’d find some time later in the week to meet with them again.

After my meeting came my first foray into the nightlife of WWDC. At every previous WWDC I’ve been to, I’ve been 20. I’ll let you figure that one out on your own. The party Monday night was Buzz’s infamous WWDC party at Minna Gallery. I had an excellent time. Tycho played and had some pretty great visuals to go along with some excellent music. Had some free drinks on Golden%Braeburn’s dime. Gotta love that. As a side note. I got a girl’s phone number at a nerd party. That makes me a badass, right?

Tuesday

Went to the Ars+Gizmodo party and managed to get the last glass of free alcohol. Lucky me. Too bad we were packed into that place like sardines. I had to leave after I finished my drink because it was unbelievably hot and uncomfortable being surrounded on all sides.

At some point, twitter directed me to go to The Tempest so I obediently obeyed. Had a great time and met some cool people. Kicked the shit out Colin Barrett in pool.

Wednesday

Met with the company again about working during the summer. I suggested that I stay an extra week and get started as soon as possible. They agreed. I changed my flight and made some living arrangements.

One of my favorite events at WWDC is Stump the Experts. It is basically a gameshow where the audience challenges former and current Apple employees on stage and they challenge the audience back with questions. Great fun was had by all and I got my first (and definitely not last) StE tshirt.

Thursday

Apple Beer Bash! Barenaked Ladies played and it was awesome. What more is there to say? Free food, free beer, free concert? Perfect.

Friday

Ah, so bittersweet. WWDC was came to and end, but I knew that I had a new adventure coming in just a few days…More on that later.

WWDC is always an amazing experience. I’m so thankful that Apple understands that students are a very import part of the developer community. They are the new developers and they should be recruiting and attracting the future of the Mac community.

.Mac -> Mobile Me
Yep, that’s happening and guess what? It is going to be pretty nice. Third party developers can easily use the service to sync data between the iPhone and the Mac. Basically, developers can post data to Apple and it will get pushed to the iPhone. The best part? Buy an new iPhone and it comes with a year free. Oh, and Apple is going to add some pretty nice iPhone integration too. Think Visual Voicemail web interface kind of stuff.

iPhone gets 3G
Yeah, duh. There have been 3G rumors forever and it was bound to happen. It will have GPS, but not much software that utilizes it at first. Oh, we will finally be able to use the iPhone as a modem.

App Store
Not available after the keynote. We are going to get a nice little demo of apps, then Jobs is going to tell us that we should get out there and start putting the finishing touches (no pun intended) on our apps because in August they are going to launch the store. Yep, not until August, sorry.

OS 10.6 demo?
No.

Other Hardware?
Psh, what do I look like? A magic 8 ball? Speaking of that, I expect around 10 magic 8 ball apps at App Store launch.

There you have it. What do I win when I’m right?

Anyone wanting to meet up, let me know at first name + last name + @gmail.com.

After I leave SF.

CRAP. Oh well. I got to see Laura Veirs in Dallas and it was amazing. It was a really small venue with only about 40 people. I got a picture with her and a signed album, Year of Meteors, which is an amazing album if you haven’t heard it. Her new album, Saltbreakers, is amazing too. I really hope she tours again…