AdHoc
The AdHoc/MacHack conference wrapped up after a year of hard work and preparation by all the incredible people on the committee. I want to thank them for all the effort they put forth.
There were also great sponsors. O'Reilly provided dozens of books, QuickSilver provided a secure server, Take Control provided snacks, and Bare Bones provided the T shirts. In addition, nVidia provided four GeForce 6800 Ultra DDL cards for use as prizes, and Speakeasy provided a T1 for us for a week for free. Our sponsors are amazing and I'm very grateful that they helped.
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[As I write this, I realize how many superlatives I'm using. I wish I could tone it down, but then I just couldn't do it justice.]
It was a much smaller conference this year. It seemed like everyone stayed away because they weren't sure how things would turn out. It's a shame because it was incredibly fun. There were three main events, each one enough to be worth the trip:
David Pogue took the stage as our first keynote speaker. His topic was ostensibly tips and tricks of Mac OS X, but it turned into a reminiscing about older times, an interactive chat session, and a performance of some of his filk. He shared his tips, but we managed to give him a few new ones, including answering his long-standing question of "What's that 'letter' thing that Mac OS 7 lets you search for?" (We think it's AOCE/PowerTalk.)
We were eagerly awaiting Jordan Hubbard to be a featured presenter. (Apple doesn't allow its employees to give "keynotes", as that's only done by Jobs.) Unfortunately, he fell ill with only a few days left before the conference. Daniel H Steinberg (keynote chair) came through in a big way with Steve Hayman.
Steve was amazing. He's an old Unix guy who was showing off all of his old shell tricks, but he's also a Mac fanatic (via NeXT) who showed off the power (both good and evil) of Apple Remote Desktop. I cannot remember ever laughing so long and hard.
And the third big event was the AdHoc Labs Showcase. Gordon Worley was the MC, Allon Stern ran mikes, Chris Erbach ran coordination on the stage, and I ran nuts giving away swag to the audience. Despite the smaller audience, we had some quality demos. The top three were:
- Unsummarize by Jörg Brown. A Service to start with a summary sentence and expand it into something useful. A request from Pogue.
- MegaManEffect by Michael Zornek. It introduces launched apps in the style of the Mega Man 2 video game for the NES
- Scroll Plate by Lisa Lippincott. Bemoaning the lack of a scroll wheel on her PowerBook, she made her Mac watch her over an iSight, and scroll up or down depending on the direction of the arrow on the paper plate she held.
My demo was much simpler. I patched out Apple's Crash Reporter so that if an app crashed, and it had an email in a certain key in the Info.plist, the Crash Reporter would email the crash to that specified email address as well as to Apple. (BTW, if anyone at Apple is listening, those crash logs of FallDownGoBoom.app that I submitted can be ignored.)
And between those Big Three events were lots of interesting sessions.
I had an absolute blast this year. Ask anyone else who attended, and I know that they'd agree. If you couldn't make it this year, make sure to schedule in next year's conference. It's going to be AdHoc/MacHack 20, and it's going to be huge.
See you then.