Chris Crawford, author of the hit game "Balance of Power" and the seminal book The Art of Computer Game Design (Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984), kicked off MacHack with an inspirational keynote address about how he created games that were considered commercially unconventional at the time, but enjoyed great success when end users discovered them. From that point on the action never stopped, with technology sessions, business presentations, code clinics, and hacking in the 24-hour-a-day computer room. Technology sessions lasted anywhere from 30 minutes to 3 hours. Session topics included cross-platform development with the Win32 API, CyberDog, Copland, OLE, SOM, OpenDoc, and the MacOS. Formal papers presented included "Video: Implications of 60-Year Old Technology, How To Deal With Its Idiosyncrasies," by Chris Russ; "A Macintosh-based Real-time, Multitasking Data Acquisition System," by Greg King; "Design Methods for Task Prioritization, Fragmentation, and Inter-process Cooperation," by Grant Neufeld; and "Creating Interactive Television (ITV) Applications," by Timothy Knox.
The business presentations lasted about an hour each. These sessions provided information on business-related topics such as "Market Research: How, What, and Why," "Project Planning and Management," and "Getting Funded: Start-up and Growth." The code clinics, scheduled for about two hours every afternoon, gave attendees the opportunity to dissect, debug, and discuss code - hands-on and up close.
The "machine" room had 100 or so Macs and about 50 Windows PCs (provided by Apple and Microsoft, respectively) for seeing who could write the best hack. The MacHax "Best Hack Contest," which originated in 1987 with the MacHax Group, is still a no-holds-barred hacking contest. The fundamental rule is that the hack not have any commercial overtones, as source code is typically made available. Beyond that, the specific rules are that "Scott and Greg make all the rules," "any entry must have been written some time during the last year, "supplying source code will get you more votes," and "all hacks shown will be included on the conference CD (unless you can give us a really good reason to exclude it)." (The MacHax Group, reachable at http://www.hax.com/hax.html, is a software development company that created and continues to sponsor the MacHax Best Hack Contest.)
The hacks themselves are divided into two categories - those started before the contest, and those started and completed during the three-day conference. Nearly 60 participants submitted hacks. Two of the most memorable were a Mac startup animation (by Bob Desoff and Jerry Felipe) and a Mac QuickDraw3D/QuickTime movie. The startup animation depicted the two words "Mac" and "OS" squeezing the Windows logo until it disappeared, leaving only the MacOS logo. The QuickDraw3D/ QuickTime movie was a user-controlled, 3-D fly-through of the Grand Canyon.
The hack contest is the essence not only of MacHack, but of programming in general: Contestants aspire to a much more valuable prize than anything money can buy - peer respect. It's the ooohs and aaahs of those who know and can appreciate the effort of a good idea and its implementation. It is what causes us all to stay up programming into the wee hours of the morning. MacHack - and the software industry in general - is not just about money. It is also about expressing a vision and sharing cool hacks with your friends.
Interestingly, while MacHack has historically been considered the preeminent conference on Macintosh programming, this year Microsoft tagged along with a preconference workshop entitled "Windows 95 for Mac Developers." Among the seminars presented to traditional Mac programmers were the Win32 API, virtual memory management, memory, mapped files, processes and threads, structured exception handling, Windows 95 user-interface architecture, development tools, and code portability.
Expotech, the conference organizer, is making this year's hacks available on a CD-ROM ($34.95); contact Expotech at expotech@machack.com (or at 313-882-1824). You can also review the hacks at the MacHack home page (http://www.machack.com).