MacHack Yields Clever Tricks With Apples

gagganator writes: "Machack (that 72 hour nonstop hacking contest) has ended, and here are the hacks voted most interesting. also, Steve Wozniak spoke about everything from phone phreaking to the future of computing." Sounds like a fun event -- does anyone have any other first-hand stories about this year's Machack?

Comments

Cool hacks from the show

[sometwo]

There is a more complete review of the show at macworld.com

Here are my favorite hacks:

Some guy hacked an Apple one button mouse to make it two button. Here's a picture. Here is the relevant passage from the article:

He hands over a familiar-looking Apple ADB bar-of-soap style mouse. It's a little shiny, of course, but it looks perfectly ordinary, right down to its two buttons.

Two buttons? Yes, two buttons. Josh happened along the specs for the off-the-shelf chip that drove the Apple ADB mouse, and noted an unused pin labeled SW1. SW0 is the signal line for the mouse button...did this mean that this thing had unexploited two-button support all along?

In the end, all it took was putting in a second switch and running its two leads here and here. No re-engineering or re-design necessary. Only marginally more difficult than making toast. Of course he had to write a special mouse driver so the Mac could recognize the surplus button, but it works.

Now that's a hack.

Here's another intersting quote about John Warnock, CEO of Adobe:

And most importantly in this venue, he proved himself a hacker. His presentation software? Adobe Acrobat. Naturally, he'd stick to an Adobe product over Microsoft PowerPoint. But Acrobat doesn't really have any built-in niceties as a presentation tool. No problem...John wrote Distiller code that automatically processes a folder of data into an organized presentation. He also uses Acrobat as his format of choice for storing his collection of digital photos...again, powered by Distiller code.

The revelation of his use of Distiller came during the Q&A that followed, and invited a question: if you're unsatisfied with Microsoft PowerPoint, why not put out a new version of Persuasion, the presentation app Adobe stopped supporting a few years ago? Basically, because that requires an investment of not-considerable money and resources, and it's impossible to compete with a piece of software which Microsoft -- for all intents and purposes -- gives away.

Then why not release Persuasion's code as open-source, so someone else can update it? Not a bad idea, John mused...

There was a big opensource sermon also.

Some people just don't get it

[shagoth]

For those who have attended MacHack, ESR included, there is an understanding of the spirit of what's going on. The hack show is about rediscovering what it is that makes engineering and software design fun to begin with. Sure, some hacks are derivative and some are pure presentation with little or no coding involved. Heck, some the most legendary hacks have been pure showmanship. The reason that things like the Password sniffer went over well is because of the presentation. Blackmailing the entire audience serves as excellent marketing.

Judging a hack on merits of utility or even total originality isn't fair. That's just not what this event is about. There's more here than merely recompiling dsniff to run on OSX. I would have thought that the whole thing would be fairly obvious to the slashdot crowd at large. Clearly, some get it and some don't.

Now I need to figure out why I'm awake at 6a PDT on the Monday following 72 hours with very little sleep.

Re:dedicated hackers

[Eagle7]

That makes him resourceful (read: Hacker), becuase he still manages to get a conference of use out of his laptop *before* he bitches and gets it fixed. Perhaps if we had more people like him and less like you in this world, there would be a lot more doing, and a lot less bitching. Either that, or we need to bring back reruns of McGyver and the ATeam to get the do-it-yourself, hack-it-together spirit back.

Succes!

[roguerez]

Looks like the contest succeeded. They managed to Dos-attack Slashdot almost contineously for the last 48 hours. :)