MacHack 18 Wraps Ups and Retools for Next Year

The eighteenth MacHack conference wrapped up with its traditional Hack Show starting at midnight Saturday morning. All of the attendees, staff and volunteers turn out for this event. The auditorium, while not as full as in previous years, accommodated a very respectably large crowd. When asked for a show of hands of who would be attending WWDC as well, the response was near fifty percent. This kind of showing certainly makes the future of development on the Macintosh look healthy, and the fifty-three hacks presented at the show certainly backs that up. The hacks included such gems as: Air Pong, where up to four PowerBooks were lined up side by side and the pong ball travelled through the desktops of each machine; GUI Kablooie, where the Finder windows shrink down to the size of asteroids and a spaceship comes in to play the classic game by shooting the moving windows; Interface Unbuilder, where interface elements such as buttons could be dragged live out of one application window into the window of a different application and still function. The hack voted best of show this year was Unstoppable Progress by Ben and Jon Gotow. This hack modified the progress bar that appears for such operations as copying a file or unstuffing an archive so that when the bar was full, the aqua inside the bar broke through end and spilled into the window. The result was that the window filled with sloshing water.

I attended the planning session later that day to learn what was in store for the conference next year. Some significant changes are taking place which will make MacHack 18 the last MacHack Conference as it currently exists. The planning committee for next year has changed the name of the conference to reflect its new focus. The new name is the Advanced Developers Hands On Conference, and will also be referred to as ADHOC: MacHack 19. This years session chairman Avi Drissman has moved up to chair the planning committee and the conference for next year. I spoke with Avi about the motivation behind the changes for the conference. Avi related that the planning committee agreed that the negative connotation of the work Hack in today's world of network security issues causes the the MacHack name to misrepresent the true nature of the conference; especially to newcomers. The fact that Mac or Macintosh is no longer represented in the name has some significance as well. While the conference intends to maintain its strong focus on the Macintosh platform, for years the conference has also covered technologies loosely coupled but not directly related to the Macintosh. Technologies such as C/C , JAVA, multiple platform development tools and entirely independent platforms such as Palm and its OS have been covered many times. With the advent of Mac OS X, its UNIX underpinnings, and its Open Source core; the conference is expanding its focus to highlight these aspects of the Macintosh platform which should attract developers traditionally uninterested in Macintosh technologies. The date of the conference has also been changed. The committee decided that end of July would be a more attractive date to those interested in attending the new conference and Apple's WWDC.

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