The 16th annual MacHack conference ended with an awards banquet to celebrate the conference and give awards to the best hacks presented at the show. Of all the original Apple greats who spoke over the three days of the conference, only Donn Denman made it through to the very end. However, all of the members stayed at least two days, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak stayed until Saturday morning. Woz only missed out on the easy day of the show, a nice dinner, a movie and a midnight ice cream social.
Conference chairman John Penn thanked all of the early Apple keynote speakers and all of those responsible for making this year’s MacHack the largest attended ever. This year, 330 attendees representing some of the brightest members of the Macintosh developer community were present at the conference. Penn also thanked Cal Simone who worked to make the Mac reunion and Woz keynotes happen.
During the conference, the top 100 developer issues with Mac OS X were tallied. Eric Gundrum, the conference committee person who collected the list, is planning to establish an online community to follow this and help expand Mac OS X’s documentation and information resources. He has requested SourceForge to run this, and email can be sent to info@extendamac.com to request participation. Gundrum says that this will take a week or two to set up, so don’t expect a response right away.
Prizes were given by the MacHack committee to all of the ‘Yoot’ or youth attendees. These were no small tokens of appreciation either: Yoots got T-shirts, copies of Photoshop, GoLive, Final Cut Pro 2, Intellimouse Explorers and more. However, adult conference attendees — typically programmers — received tokens of esteem and honor selected from the nooks and crannies of Duke’s hardware store.
The Hack Show, sponsored by the MacHax group and not affiliated with MacHack, has as its prizes what essentially amounts to junk. Nevertheless, the coveted Victor A-trap — which has symbolism and history too long to go into here — still elicits awe from MacHack attendees. This year’s winner was Mac Murrett for his hack called Apple Turnover. Apple turnover flips the screen on a Mac and spins it around. The hack ran very smooth, and was also AltiVec enabled for superior performance. Also, you could still use the Mac while it was spinning.
After that, conference attendees went to see “Tomb Raider” and returned shortly after midnight for an ice cream social. The social officially ended MacHack, and exhausted programmers and reporters filed off to their rooms for much needed sleep.
We will bring you a complete list of winners and where to get the official MacHack CD when the information is announced.