Christmas came early this year when my dad let me borrow his WWDC badge for the keynote (he wasn’t too interested in camping out), so I thought I’d extend the favor to you guys and let you at least see what it’s like. For the record, my first stevenote, and, well, it was an experience. So, to begin, John Casasanta (iClip), Austin Sarner (AppZapper), Blake Burris (CocoaRadio) and I enter Moscone center at around 8 am. Doesn’t look too bad, looks like we beat the crowd?!

We go up the escalators to the second floor… crowd’s pretty sparse. We leave Blake at the media desk. (He has some trouble with the guy there and ends up waiting 45 minutes for his press badge, but beats us out at the end with a seat six rows from the stage.)

Nice. The Longhorn/Vista trash talking banners make a return. The first: “Mac OS X Leopard: Introducing Vista 2.0″. The second, “Redmond has a cat, too. A copycat.” And the third and by far the best, “Hast la vista, Vista”. Cheeky Apple, very cheeky.

Uhoh. So I guess we weren’t that early. Patches of Mac fanbois are starting to appear, clustered mainly around the breakfast food and drinks.

Walking down a little bit further. This is getting sort of bad. I wish Austin and I had come earlier, like way earlier, than we planned.

Uhhh yeah. Turn the corner, and wow. Guess we should’ve gotten here at 5 am or so like everyone else.

Mac fanbois unite. The line of people was literally snaking around the floor. Unbelievable. (Later at the keynote, Steve mentions that this is the biggest WWDC ever with over 4000 developers attending.)

We sit down and hang out with Brian Ball (AppZapper, MacZot), Trygve Inda (EarthDesk), Edward Laing (Pzizz) and Juan Alverez (CastLife) while waiting for the doors to open. Juan distracts us with some card tricks. I see a lot of Macbooks, Macbook Pros, and DS lites in the crowd. (And one guy playing a PSP.)

David Nanian (of award-winning and popular backup application Super Duper) poses for the camera with Brian. If only we could turn time back…

Chilling with ShapeShifter’s Jason Harris and Monkey Business Labs’ chief monkeys, Josh Keay and David Keay. Jason and Josh were especially nice after having collaborated with them in various ways before.

Ooh! A few minutes past 10 am, the line starts moving. It’s finally happening, and the excitement is literally just running through the crowd.

Going throught the second floor again, we’re split up into three lines, one per up-escalator. I get brief images of bright green shirted cowboys rounding up and splitting a herd of cows.

Woohoo, Keynote here we come!

As we get to the third floor, I notice people starting to speed up. Apple employees are telling us not to run, but us Apple fanbois nevertheless do what we can to walk about as fast as we can without breaking into a jog. In retrospect, pretty silly, but hey, everyone was doing it.

We sit down, and the last stage of waiting begins. The hall is loud, there’s projector screens on either side of us with the footage they’ll be putting up later, and they’re playing some Coldplay, Gorillaz, and again, cheekily enough, Postal Service.

Just a quick snap of my row. It was a fun bonding experience. From left to right, David Keay, Josh Keay and John Casasanta again.

After a false alarm (yeah, we actually all started cheering when some guy who vaguely looked like Steve popped his head out or something), oh my God oh my God it’s Steve! His face wasn’t as blurry as it appears here.

At this point, I invite you to switch to the Quicktime movie Apple has up recording the Keynote.

And… it’s over. Note the mix of exhilaration, ecstacy, shock and pure post-reality-distortion-field syndrome on John’s face.

We promptly go downstairs to pick up our preview copies of Leopard. Woot.

Finally, stepping outside afterwards. There’s an air of festivity, lots of discussion, and a lot of hungry developers. Before we go for some lunch, I take one more snap. The three most influential Macintosh ginger developers. I don’t think Panic’s Will was too happy about this one.

I know it’s nothing like experiencing it for yourself, but hey, next best thing right? The keynote was a blast, I’ll be posting more about it later. Hope you enjoyed this glimpse at what it was like. Now, back to installing Leopard…