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I absolutely love the WWDC. I’ve never been to one, most likely never will be to one, but I absolutely love it. I love it because it’s the future of the Macintosh and all things Apple.

I should point out now that this article offers no speculation on an iTablet or a 3G iPhone. All I know about Mac OS X 10.6 is what we’ve posted here at Appletell. Instead, this article is merely a nod of appreciation to the people who attend this event, who do what I can’t. They create the software and hardware that not only keeps us entertained, but that allows many of us to earn a living.

I can play football. If there were a strike this year, the games were dropped, and my Seahawks were forced to all open car dealerships, I’d still be able to play with my friends on the high school practice field.

I can write books. If Steve Martin was to take his funny back to film, Christopher Moore was to make sense of the world, and Neil Gaiman was to buy a boat and start wearing Gap clothing, I could always write my own books. I could read those written by my friends. I could re-read the ones I liked and discover the countless volumes I’ve never opened.

I can see plays. Hollywood could fall into the ocean and I’d still be able to see local theater companies, summer stock, and high school musicals. Well, perhaps not the high school musicals, especially if the production is High School Musical.

What I can’t do—what I can’t even fathom doing—is creating computer software. I can’t imagine having someone hand me developer tools and say, “Here, have at it.” I know there’s training to be had, classes to take, but I also know they’d do me no good. I mean, I could take years and years of figure skating lessons, I could even buy out the French and Russian judges, but I still wouldn’t be taking home the gold.

I have friends who code software (though mostly for the PC, and none for computer games or the iPhone, the good-for-nothings). One was my roommate my sophomore year of college, and I remember many a night when I was set to partake of some campus skullduggery. I’d ask Willy (Bill, for short) if he wanted to accompany me, and he’d say he couldn’t because he had a math problem to do.

“Just one?” I’d ask. “No problem. I’ll wait.”

“It’ll take me a couple hours to finish it,” Willy would say.

A couple hours? A couple hours to solve one problem? The concept baffled me. I was an English major, a field in which there were no answers to problems. The trick wasn’t to solve a problem, but to pretend to solve it and then BS your way through a few pages of support arguments.

Not for the engineering students, though. Their world consisted of problems with solutions. Chaos with order. Zeros with ones. Their world had answers, and they had to find them, even if it took two hours just to find one. Then they had to remember how they found it and apply that knowledge to other problems.

Willy did this, and the WWDC is full of guys like Willy. It’s full of guys who attempt to command a world I can’t understand so they can make plenty of money off guys like me. More power to them. I need their products as badly as they need my money.

See, I couldn’t learn this stuff. I wouldn’t want to try. I can look at blank paper and fill it with words. I can make educated guesses as to what will affect readers in certain ways, and I can try to keep them involved for a few hundred pages. I can make my words communicate with people. What I can’t do is make my words communicate with machines. I can’t put words and commands into strings that talk to chips and diodes and processors and who even knows what else. To do that, everything has to be exact. Everything has to sit in its proper place and read the proper way. Software code, as far as I can tell, is the writing equivalent of being punished in grade school for speaking out of turn.

And yet, there are people who do this. There are people who can not only take a new SDK and learn it, master it and create with it, but who also revel in it. I won’t even try to explain that. I could guess it’s the challenge, maybe. Perhaps it’s a feeling of control they get from making code behave the way they want, or the thrill of getting their hands on this code before the general public. I think, however, I’m leaning more towards the idea that they just want to create. Just as I attempt with novels, plays and Appletell articles, developers just want to create something of value. They want to give the world something we can appreciate, and hopefully make enough money off of it to continue doing so.

Thus, the WWDC. Have at it, ladies and gentlemen. Learn what you gotta learn. Do what you gotta do. Then, come Macworld Expo 2009, show it all off to me. Amaze me. Make me rethink the way I work and the way I play. Take OS X, the operating system that’s easily the best I’ve ever used, and make it even better. Apple wants you to, I want you to, and your boss wants you to. Heck, the American economy needs you to. We’re all in this together.