The Missing ADC Videos
I’m sitting here tonight listening to another great episode of LateNightCocoa. (It’s a new podcast about, you guessed it, Cocoa). Scott Stevenson is on and talking about lots of good stuff, including the value of joining ADC with the Leopard Starter Kit. Scott goes on to talk about the WWDC videos which are a sore subject for me, and I want to clear the air of misunderstanding that seems to be out there.
In this episode Scott goes on to say you’ll get “all the WWDC videos” if you join ADC as a Select Member. This is a not true. When you join ADC as a Select Member and get the “Leopard Starter Kit” you get a selection of the WWDC videos, not all of them. Only if you attended WWDC do you get all the videos. I’m guessing Scott went to WWDC and thus, he does see them all. The sore point for me was that in 2006 I did not get to attend WWDC. It wasn’t until October, when Apple finally started offering the this Leopard Starter Kit with a Select Membership that I began to catch up on all this new stuff. At the time I jumped right on board and noticed they were distributing the WWDC videos over iTunes (which was better than the previous year of streaming only, but still much less desirable than the DVDs we used to get).
When I first logged on I saw about 50 sessions on iTunes but took the small number as “in-progress” thinking they were still digitizing the sessions and would put more up over time. Now, fast forward to December when I start to get more serious about my 10.5 needs — after reading up on some changes to Core Data I go to look for a session to watch. Nothing. I think it’s strange and so I comment to a friend how weird it is that no Core Data sessions are on iTunes yet and he tells me he sees a ton of them. Huh?!?
So, I go back and reread the marketing for this Leopard Starter Kit. It says nothing about only getting some of the videos. It said (at the time):
Leopard Videos from WWDC
Use ADC on iTunes to view Leopard session videos from WWDC 2006. Whether you’re at your desk or on the go, you’ll learn about Leopard directly from the Apple engineers who are building it.
I emailed ADC Membership Support to ask what’s going on…
Hello Michael,
Thank you for contacting the Apple Developer Connection regarding ADC on iTunes.
Please know that ADC Select Members can only access WWDC 2006 Leopard Sessions. Access to all other WWDC 2006 Sessions are currently only available to ADC Premier Members and WWDC 2006 attendees.
We hope that this information is useful to you. Please let us know if you have any questions regarding this information.
Best regards,
Luke Hoctor
Now to be fair they did give out only selected sessions during the 10.4 Starter Kit, but back then they also clearly advertised thats what you would be getting. The marketing for this 10.5 Starter Kit doesn’t make a note of limited sessions and leads to a huge misunderstanding.
For me it’s also frustrating at the sessions I got versus the sessions I didn’t get. I ended up with this significant stack of OS X Server stuff (which while I’m mildly interested in, doesn’t really impact my work) and then not getting one Core Data session, no What’s New in Cocoa, no User Interface Design, no Complex Controls in Cocoa — I mean those are some sessions that would really help me make Billable a better application.
A few years ago they used to allow any ADC member the ability to buy the WWDC DVDs even if you didn’t attend (and I did so one year as a student who didn’t get to go) but over the last few years Apple has started to institute a behavior that only gives you access to the WWDC sessions if you attended WWDC which I think is a mistake. The reality is lots of people can’t go every year or at all. Some work for smaller companies which have trouble affording it and some are open source projects, thus having even tighter funding issues. Why you would want to limit the distribution of educational materials that help people improve the value of your platform baffles me. I mean sure, back during the DVD days there was a hard cost to distribution, but with the advent of ADC on iTunes this is practically free.
Don’t take this post the wrong way. I am an ADC Select member and I love going to WWDC when I can, but the ongoing drama around these WWDC session, holding them back when sometimes they are the only documentation we have about new APIs is just dumb and Apple should get over it. WWDC’s value is much more about the people than it is about the sessions. Holding back sessions distribution to add value to attending WWDC is just plain stupid.
UPDATE 2/14:
Yesterday I received this in the ADC News:
2 New WWDC06 Video Available for Online Members ADC Online Members can now log in to ADC on iTunes and watch ‘Taking Advantage of Leopard Features in Cocoa’. Gain an in-depth understanding of Cocoa support, and how to use the Cocoa API to incorporate the cutting-edge features of Leopard in your application.
When you upgrade your membership with the Leopard Early Start Kit, you’ll receive access to the complete collection of Leopard session videos from WWDC06, and the essential resources and information you need to develop with Mac OS X Leopard today.
I mean really! This is such a misleading phrase: “complete collection of Leopard session videos from WWDC06”. What a bunch of marketing weasels.
Posted on: February 8, 2007 – 12:37 am
18 Comments
Why did they disable ADC?
Doh. Sorry. This occurred to me as a possibilty as I was listening to the interview playback.
Don’t worry Scott. It’s an innocent mistake. I actually considered redoing the intro since I don’t mean to bash you —- but it was your comment that reminded me I wanted to blog this.
Couldn’t agree with you more. I refuse to understand why so many of the WWDC sessions must remain confidential. It’s not like they even told us everything there is to know in the first place… You’d think they would like to tell the world how to make the best possible software for the Mac. Instead, WWDC seems to be a place for sharing secrets, not for spreading information.
I think this situation is almost as bad as Apple’s ‘black box’ bug reporting system which is also a mayor …handicap.
To rub some extra salt in the wound: yes, John Geleynse’s ‘User Interface Design’ session really was the best session of WWDC 2006. In fact, I think it should have been compulsory for all attendees. It should be linked to from the ADC home page. It should be under the pillow of any developer creating gui apps.
Has anyone else had trouble downloading the sessions from iTunes? I have no trouble downloading a bought movie from iTunes but I am unable to download a complete video session from WWDC on iTunes. It will start downloading and at a random point reset the download and start at zero again. So I have not been able to download any session.
@david: I have noticed that it is not possible to pause/resume session downloads (anno 2007!) Maybe that can explain your experience.
@david: I’ve had trouble and later found it was my router causing the trouble.
It’s annoying that there’s not more content available, but I also think we have to applaud Apple. Screencasting is a grat resource, especially for topics not easily tackled in technotes or html.
(e.g. the CoreData vid. Good luck trying to explain all that in a pdf!)
Hopefully, we’ll see a lot more video from Apple, with wider distribution. Right now, this is the most useful thing Apple can do for the broad base of their devs, especially the large subset of devs that are transitioning (or going to have to transition) from procedural/Carbon/C++ practices over to ObjC and Cocoa.
And Kudos and Karma Points to Mike, for providing professional screencasts. This, more than any single product feature, has made Billable stand out in an otherwise crowded market.
Back when WWDC 2004 shipped on dvd, I ripped the audio from the vids and threw them on my iPod so I had something to entertain me during the work commute (~4 gigs of audio sure does beat ~40 gigs of video for little additional benefit). Then WWDC 2005 was streamed via ADCTV (suck) and now the observation that we (select members sans wwdc) only get presumably less than 1/3rd the content at WWDC.
The problem I see is there is not a lot of difference between watching the several dozen gigabytes of video and listening to a few gigs of audio with the slides pulled up in preview to be honest. The canned demos clearly show the bling factor, but they are not instructional so I walk away saying, gee they sure made that look easy yet still having to retire to documentation to even get the first clue of what I just saw. So basically like a trained dog I just ignore the WWDC content and head straight for the documentation and sample code.
While I’m all for ADC Select on a pro-line h/w year, I seriously question if I will cough up the yearly ADC tax between applecare agreements… not if this cycle continues.
To me, paying a few hundred for a DVD set is entirely cost effective compared to say a trip to SF for WWDC for those of us that are moonlighting as Cocoa programmers and/or supporting a family. Of course I did see instances of the 2004 dvdset showing up on ebay, so it’s no wonder they wanted to watermark the videos via iTunes to your ADC credentials.
In the end what I’d really like to see is CocoaCast-like delivery for more advanced content from Apple, or in fact ANY declared Cocoa expert. Rentzsch did it for CoreData… I’d like to see a format out there that is more then just war stories of the indie mac developer, interviews with buddies about what hot new apps they are working on, or aggregated Leopard guesstimations, but more substance that is actually assists the new developer. Just because we’re new to Cocoa doesn’t mean we are not programmers.
Isolating thanks to video-based instruction, I really must applaud Rentzsch’s embeddedframework and CoreData tutorial and the work done on CocoaCast. It is a shame that those are the only instructional instances I can point out in video form. Anyone know of other material, if Apple is going to continue to disappoint those that don’t go to WWDC or on a larger scale do something more interesting with their hands-on session video content?
It does surprise me that there aren’t VTC or Lynda.com Cocoa/Objective-C volumes of content (even for beginners) — there is for every other development environment.
@Mark Grimes: I’ve personal been considering doing some Cocoa screencast instruction for a few months now. The problem of course is funding such an initiative as these screencast are a lot of work to produce. And then even when all the pieces come together the videos will most likely be beginner to intermediate in complexity since that where the (limited) Cocoa audience is so I don’t know how much advanced Cocoa programmers will get out of them.
We’ll see. I’ll have more to say on the blog should anything happen on this front. Thanks for sharing your interest.
I’ve been looking for the same thing (Lynda.com style videos for Cocoa.) Yup, the audience is smaller, but that would be reflected in the jacked-up price.
BTW, despite my view that Apple should be applauded for going with instruction video, I do agree that ADC Select members are getting a bit shafted here. I can’t really see how sequestering the content away from the broader development base actually helps Apple. All it does is create an artificial barrier to knowledge about the very platform and technologies they wish to promote. I understand there are costs they have to recoup, but those costs are trivial in comparison to the mid to long term benefits.
Apple need to see these resources as not a revenue source but an investment in their own profitability.
Yep.. The router was the issue. I connected my DSL directly to airport and it works now. I bypassed my Asante router. So what is it about certain routers that is preventing someone from downloading ADC videos from iTunes? There must be some setting that needs to be changed on the router.
Also I noted a few years ago when I first came on board that at the time (not sure if this still applies), they advertised the “early adopter kits / starter kits” — They were the exact same thing as the Select membership with a SINGLE difference: With the Select (and not early adopter branding) you could only get the h/w discount on your RENEWAL year, whereas the early adopter packages got it on their first year of signing up. That I know screwed some people, because for most of us the h/w discount is the big deal since it severely diminishes the cost of the membership.
So unless someone can confirm this is no longer true, I recommend if you do not already have ADC Select that you only buy it during a time there is this early adopter package exclusively.
What’s even worse is I found out there is a section called Foundational Sessions. I assume this is only available to WWDC ticket purchasers and Premier subscribers. This section contains videos from WWDC 2004/2005.
I wrote ADC an email asking why they took away the ADCTV streaming WWDC2005 from me and apparently have put some of the content on ADC on iTunes and I don’t have access to it.
Apple does a really good job making it hard for newcomers/hobbyists to get information on developing for their platform. I think they should make all the old content available to all paid (NDA-ed) ADC members.
I remember a time (I believe it was after attending WWDC 2001) when I received 3 (three) keys for online access to WWDC video’s. Two of those keys were meant to be given away (transferred) to any other ADC member’s account, be it a free ‘online’ member or otherwise.
In those days online video’s were still mostly stamp sized gadgets, but it was a nice gesture nevertheless…
So, is it simply the act of buying the WWDC ticket that gets you access to the complete set of videos? Or, does one actually have to attend? While $1295 is steep just for access, it would be nice to view all of that info without the added cost of flight/hotel/time off/etc.
I admit, I was fooled by the ADC Select membership details when I subscribed - I thought I was getting access to the full set of WWDC2006 videos.
Very late response to this, but it does seem a very dumb move, given that WWDC is very much that - i.e. there is no WWDC Europe / WWDC Asia. That’s great in one sense - it fosters a global community - but not so much in other respects.
Personally, I’d have thought that at this point in the growth of OS X, they should be making as much beginner-to-intermediate, pre 10.5 content available for FREE as possible. ADC can hardly be a massive revenue stream for them in comparison to the secondary benefits a strong development community brings (and better, more Mac-like, applications from developers moving over to the platform).
Then again, it probably comes from a focus that every division has to be profit-making, which hasn’t done the company (as a whole) that badly over the last few years, but maybe it’s time to start letting their hair down a little?
If there are any authors out there that would like to work with us to produce one or more courses on Cocoa and mac development in general, then feel free to contact me personally. I’d love to see video tutorials added to our library, but it’s always been hard to find authors..:-) cheers mark vernon vtc.com, mark@vtc.com
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