That time when we were “One More Thing”
This story flashes back 14 years, well before I started working on Living Spec and years before the existence of React, TypeScript, GitHub, and so many other things we depend on today.
The recent Remembering Apple’s Sweet Solution for iPhone Apps Before the App Store reminded me of a memorable moment at WWDC 2007.
In the early days of JavaScript frameworks, Alex Russell and I were invited by Apple to speak at the Apple WWDC about best practices with JavaScript. As the co-creators of Dojo, we were invited to speak, as was Sam Stephenson, original creator of Prototype.
When Apple invites you to speak, it’s not like most conferences. Whereas a normal event asks you to submit a talk and gives you a time slot and you just show up, Apple conducts several review and rehearsal sessions, even for speakers not employed by Apple.
It was a fascinating experience. We learned much about the tricks of Keynote and we even improved a bit as conference speakers. I was impressed with the amount of attention and detail they put into our seemingly not very important session.
On the day of the event, Alex and I were in the speaker ready room and it was time for our session. We had not attended other sessions as we were too busy thinking through and practicing our own talk.
We walked through the Moscone Center and saw a very lengthy queue for one session. We joked that no one would attend our session because there was clearly a much better session happening at the same time.
As walked towards our room, we then realized that this queue was actually for our session. Sadly I have no photos from this day, as it was a week or two before the iPhone was first released. Little did we know that during the session about developing for the iPhone, the One More Thing was to attend one of the sessions on JavaScript!
This was news to us, as we had not yet seen or used an iPhone, and had no knowledge of what APIs would be available for web developers on the phone (the answer would be, not much beyond normal browsers at the time!).
After some initial nerves we delivered our session and it seemed to go well enough. Sadly the video from the session was removed from iTunes several years ago.
The surprise for us was that Apple had added a few slides at the end of our talk (their own One More Thing) with additional resources about JS on the iPhone. I was given the honor of saying “One More Thing.” :)
JavaScript and web apps on the iPhone were not great at the time, more akin to proof of concepts. But this opened the door for many years of creativity and a significant renaissance of the web that continues today.
