Since I couldn’t attend the WWDC in person, I tried to the next best thing – watch it on the web. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a live video stream but instead found sites attempting the next best thing, live blogging. My first choice was TechCrunch, but it fell apart in a number of ways and so I wound up using Engadget (and thanks to Elisa Camahort), MacRumorsLive and iphonealley. What was interesting about this was that unlike TechCrunch, MacRumorsLive and Engadget both were well prepared and intelligently set up to deal with the task — namely getting the info to us! TechCrunch came off as if they had never done one of these things before! — with page layout and loading problems galore. So frustrating that, rather than miss out on the show completely, I ended up quickly scrambling to find alternatives. Thankfully, MacRumorsLive and Engadget were there to cover what TechCrunch couldn’t
However, the real star was iphonealley and the audio provided. Being able to hear in real time Steve Jobs talking about the iPhone on iphonealley, supplemented by nice up-to-date photos from Engadget and promptly updated commentary from MacRumorsLive, made the experience. Why Apple can’t just go ahead and broadcast live escapes me. Hopefully, one day they will.