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As I men­tioned in my other blog, Loud Mur­murs, next week I’ll be at Apple’s World­wide Devel­oper Con­fer­ence in San Fran­cisco. Nev­er­the­less, I’ve seen some web soft­ware, lit­tle things, that have really impressed me, and one of them was con­nected with the conference.

Here’s the first one:

The Devel­oper Con­fer­ence has a very full sched­ule of ses­sions, split into 3 tracks. They are all cat­e­go­rized, num­bered, and described in detail on the Apple WWDC Web site. While most atten­dees will want to go to a lot of these 150+ ses­sions, that’s clearly not pos­si­ble, and not every ses­sion will appeal to every attendee . In fact, the sched­ule has been in place for nearly a month. What’s been added is the fol­low­ing: You can now cre­ate a per­son­al­ized sched­ule of ses­sions and labs that will find its way to your hands, where you’ll need it dur­ing the con­fer­ence. Using the online Con­fer­ence Sched­ule, you click a ses­sion or lab you’re inter­ested in, then click on the Select but­ton in its infor­ma­tion pop-up. (you can also add ses­sions and labs from an alter­nate Ses­sions and Lab page, where ses­sions are grouped by track rather than by the schedule):

After you’ve selected all of the ses­sions that you want, like this one:

…you click a link, which down­loads a URL to iCal, which then sub­scribes to that calendar:

Then, when you then sync that cal­en­dar with your iPod or iPhone, you now have your per­son­al­ized Con­fer­ence sched­ule for each day on your iPhone:

The other web soft­ware that impressed me is the always-handy Inter­net Movie Data­base (IMDB). When­ever I’m stuck with that Now what other movie was that actor in?’ ques­tion or sev­eral like it, IMDB has been a god­send. While sev­eral sites are rolling out iPhone ver­sions of the inter­face, IMDB does a spec­tac­u­larly good job of it. The clear and sen­si­ble break­down of an actor’s bio or film’s infor­ma­tion lets you do that won­der­ful ‘swivel search’, where you can hop from actor to movie to cast to another actor to movie to direc­tor, etc. It keeps per­fect track of your bread­crumb trail, and the per­for­mance, as well as excel­lent use of the ‘slide left’ ani­ma­tion for drilling down make it a real win­ner as an iPhone web app. I hope some of my other favourite sites roll out iPhone ver­sions (Digg, Slash­dot, Fark, Boing­Bo­ing and a bunch of other won­der­ful time-wasters, I hope you’re listening!)