Today was a pretty special day in San Francisco for me: it wasn’t just special because I had a truckload of work to do, but also because I had one of my first meetups with internet friends from Macrabbit. You might know them from the excellent CSSEdit.

The Moscone is looking awesome this year. There’s some gorgeous façade artwork on display – there’s a lot more images of it in this post, as well as a look at the banners they hung up inside. But those weren’t the only huge icons on display since today, since me and Sean designed a truly massive print ad for doubleTwist that’s displayed on the side of the flagship Apple Store. It hit TechCrunch after it had been up there for an hour. Some great images of that further into the post as well.

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Well, after a solid 13 hour trip and a beefy walk around town I’ve set up base here in San Francisco again. In the next few days, I’ll be posting updates on WWDC meetings, announcements, the first shirt printing, and my presentation at Cocoaheads WWDC.

Some more images of my first day follow.
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With just a little over 24 hours to go until I am airplane-bound for 13-14 hours for my trip to San Francisco, I’ve packed my bags. Ever since I first flew internationally on my own I have a simple process that I’ve refined over time which helps me get through the long flight, stay connected with home while I’m away, and makes sure I never miss anything should have with me on my trip.

This is my ‘field pack’ (there are many like it, but this one is mine). It’s really the stuff I want to have within arm’s reach when I am on the plane, and also once I’m on back on the ground. I fill up the two iPhones with video and audio entertainment, and a few games. The Incase battery slider (top left) gives me a full iPhone battery charge (for the iPhone 3G) so I can watch some video on the other iPhone without depleting all of its necessary juice. The iPod is an external hard drive for my slighly crammed 80GB Macbook Pro. It may be almost three quarters of a decade old, but it works just fine for that. This month’s choice of book: Frank Herbert’s Dune. Last time I read it, I was 14 years old. Unfortunately, I don’t have the English version handy.

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It’s official: I never had as much giggles in an evening designing this poster for Cocoaheads WWDC. Scott asked me if I’d like to speak at the well-known Mac developer event, and I happily obliged. I also did a bit of poster art for the presentation screen and for, well, fun.

The lineup of speakers:

• Delicious Monster‘s Wil Shipley
• 280 North‘s Francisco Tolmasky
•  Dirk Stoop from Sofa
• Joachim Bondo of Cocoa Stuff
• and me. Perhaps an excellent chance to give away a shirt?

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It’ll be held Wednesday June 10th, 7-9PM, at the Stockton St. Apple Store in San Francisco.

I’m really looking forward to WWDC this year. Hope to see you all at Cocoaheads or elsewhere during the week!

And yes, those are little Xcode hammers in the smoke.

After months of searching for a video converting app that would let me choose audio and subtitle tracks contained in the ubiquitous MKV format (which is very common for anime) and re-export it to an iPhone or PS3-ready video with or without burned in subtitles, I gave up. There simply wasn’t an app that would let me do it without undertaking at least 10 manual steps with dubious command-line software and a lot of script rummaging.

Then I found MKVTools. It’s not just super-fast (my previous alternative was Perian+Quicktime, which made gorgeous subtitles, but exporting literally took hours), but it also lets me pick audio/video/subtitle tracks, and 1-click convert it to something my iPhone can play. It’s free, to boot (a few advanced features like queuing are unlocked for a tiny 5 dollars).

The UI and the icon of the app are not that great, unfortunately. I can’t do much about the UI, but here are two nice icons so you can keep it in your dock without flinching. As a bonus, there is an alternative to the modern aluminium replacement icon in ‘toolbox red metallic’ included.

MKVTools replacement icons – 1.8 MB

MKVTools can be downloaded here. Icons are for personal usage only.

It’s often said that there is great value in having a distinct shirt at WWDC, and while I’m not very preoccupied with that notion myself, I do have great fun in designing shirts. I first wanted to print a larger version of my twitter user picture, but I was curious if I could design something that was a bit more relevant to my work.

And I settled on this design. Hey, doesn’t everyone love exploded items on shirts these days? A nice large version of the shirt design is up on my flickr.

I’m printing 6 of these shirts today, and one of them will be sent off to a happy owner in a new giveaway post that’s coming up soon. Let me know if you’d like one of these shirts; with enough demand, I might print a few more.