The day right after Apple came to visit us, Microsoft came to present as well. They didn’t start with a “Apple sucks” commercial, and I applaud them for that.
The main presenter was Dean Hachamovitch, the general manager of Internet Explorer, which was pretty cool since I’m mostly interested in what’s related to the web. He seemed to be particularly enthused about accessibility and talked about IE8′s ARIA support. He also pointed out for any colorblind students in attendence that some of the bulletpoints on one of his slides were a different color from the other bulletpoints, which really isn’t the best way to go about being accessible, but it’s good to see that management can be so enthused about something that really matters to developers, and to many users.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get to stay long because I had an ACM meeting to attend, but it was a good talk to attend, and they had some good barbecue chicken too. Yumm.
The folks from Apple came to campus the other day to recruit for interns and full-timers. I have a personal distaste for Apple, but I figured it would be interesting to see what they’re up to and what their jobs and internships are like. After all, some of the products they make are pretty cool, even if I can’t afford them.
Unfortunately, the presentation started off with one of those “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” commercials, which have always been a huge turn-off for me. Even through Microsoft may not be the ideal company, nobody likes the type of promotion where you just criticize your competitors. Telling everybody to get a Mac just so they can make fun of everyone who doesn’t have one seem just wrong… Or maybe it’s just me.
The coolest part for me would probably be them talking about how the new MacBook Pro has 8 hours of battery life. My laptop doesn’t even get a fourth of that amount, so that’s just amazingly awesome and in itself almost makes me wish I had one.
Nine people from Apple showed up, so we got to see more of the variety in positions that we would at most company nights, which was pretty interesting also. And there were some Apple interns there who talked about what they had done also. I don’t remember his name, but they did have one web developer there, and it would have been great to talk to him. However, I had to be getting home and get some of my homework done.
It’s a good thing I wrote my email address on the sign-in list, though, because when I got home I found that I had received an email from Apple Notice saying I’d been selected to receive a MacBook Air. Woohoo!
