This evening I was able to catch-up on the play-by-play and buzz from Apple’s 2010 Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC). The new iPhone 4 is an amazing device and one I hope to obtain once it goes on sale. However, the coolest thing I saw was their latest App Store Hyperwall – a real-time visualization of apps being downloaded at that moment, sorted by color. I have always been fascinated by the visualization of data and this is purely stunning to watch, Apple needs to make this a permanent fixture located somewhere for the world to see online…they can even use HTML5 to do it!
Check out the videos of both the 2009 and 2010 Hyperwall’s below.
2010 WWDC Apple App Store Hyperwall
2009 WWDC Apple App Store Hyperwall
For all of the geeks out there, here is Apple’s explanation of how it was done.
This hyperwall is powered by 30 Mac Pro towers with Mac OS X Snow Leopard and EVGA NVIDIA GTX 285 graphics cards. As apps are downloaded from the App Store, their data is coalesced via an XML feed every five minutes. Apps are sorted and scheduled using Cocoa and Objective-C. The data is then passed to an OpenCL kernle, which drives the animation. Quartz Composer brings all the technologies together and renders the final synchonized output using Quartz Composer Visualizer.
