All DatabasesMacTech Vol 04-1988
MacHack
Volume Number: 4
Issue Number: 8
Column Tag: MacHack Annual Report '88
The Pick of the Hacks of MacHack
By Scott T. Boyd, Apple Computer, Inc., The MacHax™ Group,
Contributing Editor
It’s midnight in Ann Arbor. A calm, clear night, the world is at rest. I reach for
the Special Menu and choose Shutdown. A flick of the wrist and the disk drive slows to
a rest. Snap, the SE screen goes black. Unplugging everything, I pick up the Mac and
the drive and leave the hotel room. Walking down the quiet hall, I wonder to myself
how much longer I’ll be up. I’ve been up since early that morning, and it looks like
it’s going to be a long night.
Turning the corner and opening the door, I hear the first sounds of life since we
got back from dinner. Ted Nelson had spent the evening regaling us with stories of
Xanadu, but he hadn’t once mentioned Kubla Kahn. Odd. The din at dinner as a couple of
hundred hackers had consumed dish after dish of oriental food had been something.
Dinner had just been the beginning. That was then, this is now, and the noise is
tremendous.
Both doors of the suite are open. Inside, the walls are lined with machines. It’s
midnight and about a hundred people are crammed into the room, staring at small
phosphor screens. “Oohs” and “ahhs!” fill the room as twenty people cluster around
one particular machine. “Have you seen this one?” asks Greg. Leonard jumps in with,
“What about this one?” “Wait, you’ve gotta see this one first!” someone else shouts
as he rushes up with a diskette.
In a far corner, Sean is setting up the SE I just brought in. He’s not done yet and
is still working to be able to show off his hack. The noise in here is matched only by
the heat. Another Sean is setting up an HP ink-jet printer on the other two feet of the
counter top. There’s no other space anywhere near a plug. He is showing off 300 dpi
printing that is nearly silent. Of course, you have to use your imagination, but I
presume you’re already doing that.
_______________________
What possible excuse can there be for such a bizarre circumstance? Why,
MacHack ’88’s HACK of the Year Contest, of course!
MacHack, sponsored for three years now by Expotech, Inc., brings together about
two hundred of the best hackers from the Macintosh community. This year, it attracted
several celebrities, including Jim Blinn, who brought us the NASA fly-by sequences
and The Mechanical Universe animations on a shoe-string budget. It also brought Ted
Nelson, who gave the keynote talk about Xanadu. Xanadu is a proposed global docuverse
made possible through the magic of hypertext and tumbler arithmetic. Of course, most
of the attendees actually program the Macintosh, and quite a few make their livings
with that beige or platinum box.
______________________
Twenty-two hacks are in this room. Several are still in development as their
authors compile and run them for us. It’s about two o’clock and I’ve finally made the
rounds and seen most of the hacks.
Where’s Sean? He and I spent most of the day building our hack. It still isn’t
working, but we know we’re close. The SE’s gone. Not that I’m panicked or anything,
but I run back to Greg’s room, which had been serving as hacker central for the past
couple of days. Sure enough, here’s Sean, madly coding. He babbles something about
madness and noise and paces the room briskly, much too briskly for two in the
morning. He turns back to the keyboard and resumes the quest. With everything under
control, I head back to the fray
_______________________
Earlier in the day, I was sitting in the back of one of the conference sessions,
hacking on my SE in the dark. Roy Leban (of Ann Arbor Softworks, now of
Ashton-Tate) came over and shoved a disk in my machine. Rather leery of unknown
software, I hesitated. “Trust me, I’m a programmer,” he said. “Reboot and behold
marvels!” Right in the middle of a conference session, “Bing!” Then, the strangest
thing happened. When Roy opened the floppy in the Finder, one of the icons began to
spin. Spin!?! Finder icons don’t spin! Wrong again, McGillicuddy! This one does, and
I don’t even get to keep a copy of the hack! “Animator’s not ready to give out yet,” Roy
said as he sounded a theme to become quite familiar as the day progressed.
Throughout the day, people kept cornering me with, “You’ve got to see my hack.
Where’s a machine? When do you have a minute?” Finally, at dinner, the thought hit,
why not a midnight hack fair? Let’s get everyone in one place and do it just like back
in high school at the science fair? One simple announcement and the stage was set. Of
course, simple is an interesting word. You know what I mean if you’ve ever tried to
talk over Dave Feldt when he’s talking to two hundred well-fed people, all at once.
On with the story. What wondrous marvels did we behold? One category that
emerged addressed the need for managing limited screen space, a problem worsened by
multiple programs using the same screen under MultiFinder.
ShrinkWindows by Shane Looker adds a way to shrink any or all of the windows
in your current layer. When shrunken, they are about an inch big and can be moved
anywhere on the screen. When you make them big again, they go back to where they
were before you shrank them.
Holey, by Larry Rosenstein, takes an altogether different approach. Holey
removes the content region from all the windows in the front layer. Your windows
don’t move, they just become transparent, leaving behind just the frames.
Slider, by Bill Johnson and Ron Duritsch, takes yet another approach and lets you
drag all or some of your windows as a group, just as you might drag a bunch of objects
in a drawing program.
The last entry to fit into this category is RearWindow, by Allan Foster. This
one-patch hack lets you drag an icon from one window to another while in the Finder
without changing the window order. This comes in really handy when you have a small
window in front of a big window and want to move an icon from the rear window to the
front. Normally, the Finder would select the rear window, covering up the front
window, leaving you with nowhere to drop your icon. Now, hold down some modifier
keys while you click, and the windows don’t change.
The rest of the hacks don’t categorize so neatly, but here they are.
ShutDownSoundINIT, by Leonard Rosenthal, plays a sound at shutdown time. You
may already have this one. I’ve used the “I’ll be back!” sound for months now.
Leonard also submitted ∑Edit, the text-editing DA with nine hundred or so
features. I’ve also been using this one for several months.
There were two time-related submissions. Larry Rosenstein entered
TimeKeeper, a MultiFinder-compatible clock with a resizable round window and
selectable chime sounds. My favorite is the Big Ben sound.
Darin Adler and Sean Parent started from scratch at the conference to bring us
OverTime, a clock in a rectangular “ window” that stays on top of everything by
removing itself from the window manager’s regions. Someone called this “simple but
creative.” Does the label “simple” allow for seven patches and breaking all the
rules?
Greg Marriott brought out FaceLift, an INIT that lets you give any of your disks
its own icon. This is truly a simple but creative hack. All of the source code fits in
less than a page, and the user interface couldn’t be simpler.
The hack that clearly required the least amount of code came from William
Leininger. He brought the only hardware entry, a miniMac Screwdriver which
consisted of a Torx™ bit with a slot cut in the back so you can open Macs with a regular
screwdriver.
Small, specific utility hacks included DTR Resetter from Stuart Schmukler,
BNDL Rx from yours truly (it checks all the files on a disk and tells you which files
have bundle bits set and whether they have a BNDL resource), and Disk Switch from
Larry Rosenstein. Disk Switch lets you eject a disk using -1 or -2 while the
disk-switching alert is up. Those of us who use only hard disks these days may have
forgotten, but there were days when a hack like Disk Switch would have saved us some
grief. This fixes a bug in the ROM that checks for ASCII 1 or 2 instead of ‘1’ or ‘2’
(ASCII 49 or 50). People with a Control key can use Control-A or Control-B without
the patch.
In a category by itself, Darin Adler’s Buffered Menu Bar stands as the hack that
nobody can be really sure that it does anything. It works by making sure that the menu
bar never flickers; it does its job by making sure you don’t notice it.
Christoph Sold brought the hack from the furthest away by bringing Dissolve?
all the way from Germany. Dissolve? puts away a dialog by doing a color fade, where
the dialog gets dimmer and the background gets brighter. He plans to generalize this to
fade from any color picture to any other color picture. A pretty neat hack.
NetTrain runs a train across the screen of any participating machine on the
network. Sean Flynn and I got it running at about 4 a.m. the night of the Hack Fair.
I’m still amazed that no one called the hotel management to complain when it ran the
first time Gordon and Mike Sheridan worked hard to get us some train sounds with
Gordon going so far as to walk to the highway to get the sound of passing semi’s.
Kent Johnson showed RainDance, which does some pretty dazzling things with
circles to get the effect of raindrops on a pond.
Dumbo, by Jay Zipnick, showed an animated Dumbo flying around a window.
Appearances can be deceiving, and Dumbo is a good example. The animation alone is
nice and smooth, but the real stuff of this program lies in the fact that the animation
almost never stops running, even when a modal dialog is in front, when Dumbo isn’t
the front MultiFinder layer, when Dumbo’s window is being dragged around, and even
when a menu selection is in progress.
To round out the bunch, Rod Magnuson and Steve Kiene show Tear-Off Menus. You
can tear off any regular menu and leave it anywhere on your screen. Menus stay on top
of other things. If the menu is too big for the screen, it appears as a tab that pops up a
menu when you click on it. These guys have done some good work. They continued to
improve it throughout the conference.
Which hack won? That’s hard to say. Any one of these hacks, had it been the only
one there, would have provided a topic for lively discussion. These were all excellent
hacks, each having interesting solutions to problems. Some looked e specially good
because they solved a tough problem with a simple insight. Others looked deceptively
simple, hiding amazing complexity behind their interfaces. Some were just plain fun.
All of the hackers in this contest were winners because a good time was had by
everyone.
Perhaps the most convincing measure of all is that not a single person asked or
seemed to care what the prizes were. The thrill of the competition and the accolades
and camaraderie of their peers were sufficient.
So, do you feel like you missed something fun? I hope so. In the tradition of
MacHack’s past, a good time was had by all. Get your hacks started, next year isn’t that
far away.
For these hacks, see the following mini-articles. Holey, and FaceLift are
available on the MacTutor disk.
_________
For more information about MacHack, contact
Aimée Moran or Carol Lynn
Expotech, Inc.
1264 Bedford Rd.
Grosse Pte Pk, MI 48230
313-882-1824
ARPA: aimee_moran@um.cc.umich.edu
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