14 DAY TRIAL // If last year was any indication, WWDC 2013 will see all its 5,000 seats sold out before you can even hit the buy button to grab a ticket. Several services are online claiming to offer notifications, but only one is said to be reliable.
Adam Engst at TidBITS and developer Oliver Drobnik at Cocoanetics expect WWDC Blast to be the first notification system to do the job right, as in notify interested parties when tickets go on sale.
According to Drobnik (speaking of other WWDC ticketing notification services), “All those options pale in comparison with the professionalism that can be had from WWDC Blast.”
“Any kind of monitoring system’s effectiveness depends on you noticing any alert notification. And this is their flaw. If you are on the wrong cost [sic] of the USA or someplace else on our geoid that we call home, then email, push notifications or SMS won’t cut it.”
Drobnik says, “What you really want is a friend who constantly refreshes the WWDC page and calls you the second there is action there. WWDC Blast is exactly that.”
However, according to the description up on wwdcblast.com, users “sign up to receive a free SMS notice as soon as tickets are available.”
“There's no spam, and no cost to you. Just the security of knowing we've got you covered,” the description adds.
It is unclear whether the SMS service is free, but the one described above (involving a phone call) is a paid affair.
For what it’s worth, WWDCBlast also states that its “proprietary technologies and engineered redundancy at every level of [its] stack ensure that when WWDC tickets go on sale, we'll be the first to know.”
As we reported in March, Oisin Prendiville is also one of those people who doesn’t want to miss this year’s conference.
He has set up a script that will automatically phone and text him, as well as anyone else who plucks a dollar, using the Twilio API so he and others like him can “grab a ticket before they sell out.”