Finding relevant WWDC videos

As I've said before, I find the WWDC videos to be invaluable and I try watch all of them eventually. But there are a lot of them, and it can be hard to find what's relevant. And a lot of them I go back and watch again when I start working with a different part of a project.

So I've developed a trick, and I thought I'd share it with you all.

I go to the site where the videos are hosted and click on the "view all in iTunes button". From iTunes, I download all the slides (Click a track like "Essentials", then click "Slides" just above the list, and then click the "Get Tracks" button in the header).

I keep all the slides for WWDC 2010, 2011 and 2012 in subdirectories of a folder named "WWDC slides" in my Documents directory. It's indexed by Spotlight on my Mac.

From then on, when I'm working on a project, and I'm having trouble with something, or trying to remember something I might have seen, I open up that folder in Finder, and type the Class or Method names of the Classes I'm working with, and Spotlight will tell me the session names of the videos I might want to watch.

So, for example, if I type 'NSFetchRequest', the first result is "Session 214 - Core Data Best Practices" from WWDC2012. I type 'registerNib:', and I get "Session 125 - UITableView Changes, Tips, Tricks" from WWDC2011 (among others).

Then I just go to iTunes or the website, and I know which video to go watch.

It's a handy trick (and I use it to search through all my eBooks on programming, as well), and when I've recommended specific videos to people, I've had several of them ask me how I keep the videos straight.

So hopefully it's useful to some of you.

Comments

[Andrew Kozlik]

Thanks for the tip Carl. I'm in the process of downloading the slides now, and I've passed this page on to the members of the Orlando iOS Meetup Group. Hopefully someone in our group can get some use out of this!

[Orlando Escorts]

Thanks for this read mate. Well, this is my first visit to your blog! But I admire the precious time and effort you put into it, especially into interesting articles you share here!