Machack '94
Volume Number: 10
Issue Number: 9
Column Tag: The Editor’s Page
Machack ’94 - Number Nine™
By Scott T Boyd, Editor
Machack ’94 - Number Nine
This year marks the ninth year of MacHack, The conference for Macintosh
hackers. The conference started on a Wednesday night at midnight with a terrific
keynote from an (the?) original Mac hacker, Andy Hertzfeld. Just on the off-chance
you haven’t heard of Andy, he wrote vast portions of the OS and Toolbox (I know
because Iread most of it while I was on the system software team!). At any rate, 72
hours later, the conference was over and I was surprised to find that Ihad slept a grand
total of 12 hours, and I wasn’t alone in the sleep-deprivation category.
We were all too wrapped up in Andy’s talk to do any hacking during his keynote,
but hacking started in earnest shortly afterwards, and continued until midnight two
nights later just in time for the Hack Show. This year’s Hack Show (hosted by yours
truly and Special Guest Host Bruce Oberg) lasted about three and a half hours.
Stretching out this year’s show was an unusual entry which literally showed up about
halfway through - s eventy five pizzas, provided by James Plamondon of Microsoft. A
Domino’s employee had come earlier and verified the pizza order in person. They had a
hard time believing that anyone would order s eventy five pizzas at two in the morning.
After the Hack Show each year, a few of us stay up the rest of the night and put
together a ballot for voting a few hours later at lunch. After tabulation and the annual
quick trip to Perry’s Drug Store to buy a passel of exotic (i.e. cheap) prizes, we hand
out awards at an awards ceremony. This year’s ballot listed forty hacks. A number of
hacks drew special mention, including Flying Aces!, PhoneBridge™ & PowerSecretary,
Boom!, Poor Man’s Video Phone, SOS-Newt, and Time Lapse.
Extremely popular, Forever was written by Craig Prouse prior to and during
MacHack, and is an Apple ][ emulator on the PowerMac. Forever faithfully reproduces
Apple ][ behavior, all the way down to the hi-res graphics environment. During the
Hack Show, Bryan Stearns re created one of his originals in AppleSoft BASIC, much to
the delight of the crowd.
The Awards
The Best Hack Contest originated in 1987 when Greg Marriott and I noted that it
was silly to have so many of the industry’s best hackers in one place and not see any
hacking going on. The MacHax™ Group (we were partners before joining Apple; I now
run it as a consulting company) sponsors the contest every year. We’ve seen many of
the winners go on to get (and quit) jobs at Apple and other leading companies.
Fifth place, written during MacHack, went to Metrowerks New & Improved, an
addition to Metrowerks’ CodeWarrior development environment. The hack uses Apple
Guide technology (from System 7.5) to improve CodeWarrior’s display of compile
errors. The hack causes double-clicking to bring up the window with the error, then
draws a coach mark (such as a hand-drawn circle around or an X through) the
problem. It was written by Alex Rosenberg, Cheryl Laton, and Berardino Baratta.
Another emulator scored fourth place. Cameron Esfahani showed a Stargate
emulator on the PowerMac. In order to avoid offending the copyright holder, Cam made
a deal with a Stargate machine owner to remove the ROMs from his Stargate machine
whenever the emulator was demo’ed (the old one-copy-it-must-be-alright
approach). You probably won’t see this one in widespread distribution.
Third place went to NewtTablet. Bob Ebert and Jim Schram created the TouchPad
for the rest of us. NewtTablet turns your Newton into a mouse replacement for your
Macintosh, and it was written during MacHack.
Taking second place, POArk, the Pong Open Architecture, is more than just a Pong
game. The Mac server supports any number of players and balls and many different
client OSes. It was written during the conference. The demonstration included clients
running on Macintosh, Windows, Newton, and Magic Cap (almost). Fred Huxham, Fred
Monroe, Tim Dierks, Bryan Stearns, and some practically anonymous engineer (and
former winner of Best Hack) from General Magic who had to fly back for a deadline,
showed POArk, first on Macintosh, added in Windows, then Newton, and capped it with
the native PowerMac version. I’m e specially fond of how they tried to kiss up to me
(the sponsor) by plastering my rotating head on the Pong balls. Now that’s marketing!
The winner of Best Hack scored a runaway success this year, surpassing the
previous big winner by several votes, and more than doubling the number of votes for
this year’s second place winner. Doug McKenna took home the coveted Victor A-Trap
Best Hack Award with his hack, Fez. (Side note: so you can be in the know, that’s a
Victor® rat trap; I scratch off the R and the T, and voila, an A-Trap). Written before
and during MacHack, Fez demonstrates an advanced set of ZoomRect techniques. Fez
(which stands for Frame-Evading ZoomRects) wowed the crowd with its amazing
ability to convey positional information about hidden objects, but it really took the
crowds’ breath away when it demonstrated the ability to fly around and avoid any
windows which are in the way. While Doug’s showmanship threatened to make this
look like a GlamHack™, Fez demonstrated the kind of keen insight which often finds its
way into subsequent Apple system software.
Previous winners include NetBunny, RearWindow, VideoBeep, ColorFinder,
IRMan, Oscar the Grouch, and Practical Joke Protocol. These have gone on to become
products, features in products (including Apple system software), and targets of
threats from various large organizations.
Many of the hacks will be on the MacHack ’94 conference CD. For CD and
conference info, e-mail expotech@aol.com.
You Mean IMissed It?!?
Never fear. We’re bringing you two essential pieces of this year’s conference in
detail. The first is Tom Pittman’s paper on building a 68K emulator on the 601. The
Technology of Emulation: 68Kon a PowerPC won Best Paper, beating out tough
competition like The Dead C Scrolls, by Timothy Knox. Tom’s article includes an offer
to send you free software!
The second piece from the conference for your consumption is Fez, Doug
McKenna’s winning entry. It’s even better than at the conference because you get to
see all of his recently annotated and expanded code.
Missing In Action
We’ve got a couple of regular features missing this month. Due to unforeseen and
technical circumstances beyond our control, we don’t have the Think Top 10 in this
issue. Powering Up is powered down temporarily while Richard recovers from carpal
tunnel syndrome, something which has affected a number of our compatriots lately.
Oops!
It’s bad enough to goof, but on how to connect to our own ftp site? We’re
chagrined. Here’s the right stuff; Iactually tried these. Anonymous ftp to
ftp.netcom.com and look in directory /pub/xplain. In URLlingo, that’s:
ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/xplain
A First Look At Dylan!
I’ve been going on about Dylan for a while now, and many readers insisted that we
get on with the technical material. Well, we’ve been working to get something for you.
It’s challenging when Dylan’s still not a product, and the team members eat, sleep, and
breathe finishing it up. Nevertheless, we managed to snag someone to write up a quick
first look at building a Dylan application, complete with source. We’ll have more
articles later, but this one has enough material to get a sense of what it is and how it
works.
Here are highlights from the June 2nd Dylan FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions).
The latest version of the FAQ(along with many other files) is available by anonymous
ftp from cambridge. apple.com in the directory /pub/dylan/.
Dylan is a new Object Oriented Dynamic Language (OODL), combining features of
static and dynamic languages. Its goal? To support programmer productivity as well as
efficient delivery of applications and libraries. Consistently object-oriented, Dylan
isn’t a procedural language with an object-oriented extension.
The target audience for Dylan is developers of commercial application software,
most of whom are currently using static languages such as C and C++. Dylan will
likely appeal to many other groups of programmers as well, such as educational users
who want a very clean object-oriented language design, or in-house developers who
need a high-level, very productive language.
Dylan is designed to allow the powerful and flexible programming techniques and
development environments associated with OODLs, while also allowing the delivery of
small, fast applications currently associated with static languages. Unlike many
dynamic languages, Dylan’s design consciously lets the runtime environment execute
without the development environment present. Dylan will also let you selectively ‘turn
off’ dynamic capabilities when they are no longer needed, allowing more efficient
compilation.
The first book on the Dylan language was published in 1992. Since then, the
language has undergone a great deal of change in response to feedback from potential
users and implementors. Throughout this process, changes to the language design have
been published electronically in the form of design notes. The current round of
language design is now essentially complete except for the macro system.
A new Dylan language reference will be published in early 1995. This will be
the definitive specification of the Dylan language, and will apply equally to all Dylan
implementations.
You can get a copy of the interim book by anonymous ftp, in the file
/pub/dylan/interim-book.rtf It’s a combination of the original Dylan book, the
previously published design notes, and additional previously unpublished design
decisions. The document is called “interim” not because the language design is
unfinished, but because it’s a rough document intended for use until the new book is
ready.
The info-dylan mailing list is a forum for discussing all Dylan subjects. Each
day’s messages are ga thered into a digest and sent as a single compound message to the
list info-dylan-digest. The list is linked to the newsgroup comp.lang.dylan. The
announce-dylan mailing list is a moderated list for major announcements about Dylan.
All its messages are also sent to info-dylan.
To subscribe to info-dylan or announce-dylan, send mail to
majordomo@cambridge. apple.com. Make the body of the message:
subscribe info-dylan
or
subscribe announce-dylan
If you would like to subscribe an address different from the return address of the
message, include the address after the list name. For complete majordomo
instructions, send a message with the body “help”. Please do not send administrative
requests to the mailing lists. If you have trouble with info-dylan, e-mail
sysadmin@cambridge. apple.com.
The Gwydion Project at Carnegie Mellon University maintains a WorldWide Web
(WWW) page of general information on Dylan, accessible using Mosaic or other
web-browsing software. This page contains the interim book. This web page also
contains the current FAQ from Apple and other general information of interest to the
Dylan community. The URL is http://legend.gwydion.cs.cmu.edu:8001/dylan/
Apple recently announced plans to release an implementation of Dylan. The
following description of Apple’s implementation was taken from an Apple data sheet.
The Apple Dylan development environment is designed to let you create complex,
commercial-quality projects with all the advantages of a rapid-prototyping
environment.
Projects are stored in a database, unlike traditional, file-based systems. Apple
Dylan’s customizable browsers will offer a new way to look at and manipulate your
application as it executes. You can browse class hierarchies graphically, find all
references to a given routine or variable, and inspect objects in your program while
it’s running.
With Apple Dylan’s incremental compiler, you will be able to actually change
code in a running program and see the results right away. No more waiting for a long
edit, compile, link, execute, debug cycle. This gives you freedom as a programmer to
explore various options and rapidly improve your product. Apple Dylan will include a
Dylan compiler and runtime, an integrated development environment (incremental
development, configurable code browsing/viewing), the Dylan application framework,
a Dylan user-interface design & prototyping tool, and cross-language support for
seamless access to existing C and C++ code and APIs.
The first release of Apple Dylan is scheduled to ship in the first quarter of 1995.
This release will support native 68K stand alone applications. Six to nine months
after the first release, Apple will release a version of Dylan which supports native
PowerPC code and OpenDoc parts (components).
To see about getting an early copy of Dylan, send a message to the AppleLink
address DYLAN, or the Internet address dylan@ applelink. apple.com. Include your
name, address, phone number, and a brief description of how you plan on using Apple
Dylan.
Several third-parties have expressed interest in implementing Dylan. Check the
ftp sites for more details.
The FAQcovers more ground than we have space for here, but here’s a good thing
to know - Dylan functions can return multiple values. When a function returns
multiple values, the return values are not stored in a wrapper object; they are
returned directly. For example, if a function returns “the values 4 and 5”, it returns
two integers. It does not return a data structure which contains two integers.
Returning multiple values is similar to calling a function with more than one
argument. When passing multiple objects as arguments to a function, the objects do
not have to be stored in a single data structure before they are passed.
Food For Thought
Thanks to Stephan Somogyi for forwarding this timely thought: Objects in
calendar are closer than they appear.
Referenced by (2):