My last weekend was spent at the C4[1] Macintosh developer conference hosted by Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch in the fabulous “Windy City” otherwise known as Chicago.

The regulars have been weighing-in all around the web so I won’t bother you much with specifics on the sessions, other to point you to Gruber, Jalkut and Zornek for their excellent coverage. In addition, Alex Payne of Twitter rolled with us at the conference and has some seriously detailed summaries of the sessions here.

The conference was great and I am really satisfied with my decision to attend this year. I loved the variety of topics that ran the gamut from the business side of our industry to the really deep technical topics. The crowning jewel was Cabel Sasser’s history of Panic and the juicy details of their design cycle for Coda. Capping it all off with the excellent display of iPhone hacks (shout-out to Wolf for using my theme this year) made for a Macintosh conference that was a real breath of fresh air from WWDC.

As always it was great to reconnect with all my Mac-development buddies. Besides all the Seattle regulars, It was great to see folks from WWDC like Ian, Jonathan and Guy again. I also really appreciated being able to meet a few more of the faces behind the bits such as fellow rogue-brethren, Paul Kafasis.

Clearly, the most controversial event of the weekend was the now infamous DrunkenBatman panel. No point in going over the details again here, but I will add one small thing: I spent some time chatting with DB after dinner that evening. It was good conversation and he is clearly an interesting guy with intriguing points and considerable insight. Unfortunately, his fire-in-the-hole method of kick-starting the conversation didn’t work this time. Sadly, he squandered what should have been a unique opportunity to tap into the collective wisdom of the gathered panelists.

I had always lamented not getting it together and making it out to MacHack. With C4 to take its place, I no longer have that little empty place inside me. You can count me in next year and I’ll put the pressure on a few of the other sheep to go as well.

I have posted an iPhoto Web Gallery and Flickr set of the handful of snaps I grabbed with the iPhone. No flash, slow shutter, low quality…but better than nothing.