Visiting the TWiT Studios

Today is probably the last day you will find people wandering around San Francisco in their black, mock-collar, WWDC jackets before their head off to their places of origin to share their knowledge. Well, share what wasn’t suffocated by one of Apple’s infamous non-disclosure agreements.

WWDC 2011This is the first year that I have lived in San Francisco for WWDC, Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference. It didn’t make a huge difference in my life as I was not in attendance at WWDC. At $1,500 for a ticket, I decided I’d be better off catching up via TUAW and MacRumors. I did benefit from some of the awesome people that came into my city for the week-long conference.

The first night of WWDC I had dinner with a fellow Mizzou alumni Geoff Pado and Tyten Teegarden as well as Twitter friend Luke Irvin. After a few drinks, Luke and I decided we should rent a car and drive up to Petaluma California for a visit to the TWiT Studios. There maybe, just maybe, we could meet one of our favorite nerds, Leo Laporte.

And that’s what we did. Thursday morning I picked up Luke and we made our voyage north. After we reached the TWiT studios, we nervously gathered our things and headed up the steps.

We were immediately greeted with the friendly smile of a TWiT staffer. She provided a quick tour of the operations and then lead us on set where we watched the making of Windows Weekly. If you look carefully during that episode, you’ll see the right side of my body enter the frame a few times. Oops!

One of the guests on the show was Aaron Hillegrass from Big Nerd Ranch. He was super interesting and fun to listen to, equally as congenial.

When the show was over, Leo talked a little tech, signed some autographs and posed for some photos. You always hope that the people you look up to are as cool in real life as you think they are from your side of the screen. In this case, Leo was even cooler. Just so down to Earth and genuinely interested.

Luke Irvin, Me and Leo Laporte

He asked us what we did, if we were from the area, did we go to WWDC, etc etc. Some how we got onto the topic that I am a blogger, I had brought up earlier that I once wrote about him winning an Emmy… Anyways, he pulled up my blog on the live stream and began reading my blog post about the mysterious iPhone I saw last week.

Leo Laporte checking out my blog

That was super cool, I must say. He even left my blog up on the live stream while everyone else went out for lunch. Though it didn’t have much affect on my blog traffic. :-\

Afterwards we checked out the new TWiT studios which look pretty awesome.

New TWiT Studios Panorama

We rounded out the trip with a jaunt a little further north to Healdsburg where Luke and I did a wine tasting at Seghesio Family Vineyards. Quick introductions to all of my friends there, tasted around eight wines from Arneis to Zinfandel to Omaggio.

Unfortunately we didn’t have time to hit up any other wineries or check out the amazing food in Healdsburg. Perhaps next time.

I (think I) Saw the iPhone 5

Device in question is against the wall on the left, dark restaurant with an iPhone 4 camera.

Last week I saw a guy using a touch-screen phone that was super thin with a big bright screen and almost zero bezel.

It immediately caught my attention and I asked my friend Kayla, who was facing the table, to let me know if the guy picked it up and used it. It had been, until then, left to sit on the table unused.

The guy this friend was talking to said something that made the guy pull out his phone and pull up the notepad. This was when Kayla and I realized, this super thin phone was an iPhone. Sure enough, the home screen came back up and it was iOS.

It appeared that the screen took up most of the device, it was super thin, and shorter than the current iPhone. The phone was wrapped in matte black, almost like gaffers tape. It is thinner than I was able to convey in this mockup, almost as thin as a Motorola Razor screen.

I’m no good at making mockups but I did my best to illustrate what we saw.

iPhone 5 vs iPhone 4 mockup

These guys were talking about a new cloud service that was similar to “AWS” but had “no net loss.” AWS, for those who don’t know, means “Amazon Web Services” which provide a plethora of syncing and data hosting services, as well as Amazon’s new cloud music system.

We did our best to listen to their conversation as they drank beers but didn’t pull too much from it. Watching the WWDC live right now I now understand more of what they were talking about, which leads credence to the theory that this phone was indeed an iPhone 5.

All this said, I’m pretty sure that some blog like The Unofficial Apple Weblog will see this, post it and turn out that I’m totally high and these two dude work for IBM and everything is totally coincidental. However, I’m hoping that isn’t the case. 🙂

UPDATE: So after being mentioned on the TWiT Network and WWDC coming to pass, a post by Joshua Topolsky came to my attention about the design of the iPhone 5 via another blog post on some other tech site (too many to remember).

Joshua (or his people) made their own mockup and it is scary similar to the design I saw (and tried to mockup myself).

 

This is My Next iPhone 5 Mockup

This is My Next iPhone 5 Mockup