C4: Chicago Mac Developer Conference

MacHack, rest in peace, was a great grassroots conference. Small in size, and put on by Mac developers themselves, it had a feel all its own. There were a couple of years where I had to choose between it and WWDC, and I always unhesitatingly chose MacHack.

MacHack’s untimely death left a gaping void in the Mac developer conference scene.

Let’s fix that.

I’m excited to announce my new Mac developer conference: C4.

Here’s what’s going down.

Flavor

In terms of topics, most conferences focus on the technical new. For example, WWDC’s content is primarily “here are the new programming interfaces and here’s how you use them.” That type of topic is great, and necessary.

What I’d love to see more of, however, are bigger-picture directional topics. APIs come and go, but a session that changes the way I think about software stays with me. Better shelf life, and applicable to more challenges.

I wrote down a list of important trends in software, and then hit up some my adriot friends to talk about them:

• Desktop apps meld with web apps. NetNewsWire+NewsGator puts Brent Simmons on the front lines of desktop+web integration. These aren’t just apps that can “Save as HTML…” — these are a new breed of desktop apps which tightly integrate with web apps, providing an experience neither alone can rival.

• Version control advancement. Subversion alone has raised the baseline for what’s required of a competent version control system. Still, we’re only at the very beginning of the ride. Brian W. Fitzpatrick has been working on Subversion since its inception, and details its future directions.

• Anti-RDF. After a few controversial blog postings, it became clear drunkenbatman was unafraid to spill five-thousand-word bombs on the heads of his targets. A gifted interviewer, he has a knack for sniffing out under-publicized folks working behind the curtain and also poking at hornet’s nests. He leads a panel discussion covering a smattering of topics that tend to live in the RDF shadows.

• Native applications+scripting languages. It’s no secret I’m a fan of leveraging native platform APIs with scripting languages to enable building native apps in a highly productive fashion. Gus Mueller also shares my love of scripting Cocoa, to the point of enabling Lua to be used with VoodooPad. Gus talks a little about Lua itself, why he likes it, and how he integrated it with his Objective-C application.

• Consistency vs. Uniformity in UI Design. With John Gruber I operated in reverse. Based on his excellent topic track-record with Daring Fireball, instead of asking him to speak on a specific topic, I asked him to select his own topic. John tackles why Apple has abandoned uniformity in their application designs.

• Coping with More Cores. While I wrote a preemptive multithreading package for the Classic Mac OS, I can state threads are a bad solution to achieving concurrency. There’s a little-known lightweight concurrent programming model called Actors that I believe are a better fit for today’s software. Steve Dekorte created his own language that supports Actors directly. He details how the Actor model works and its benefits against raw threads.

Fuel

We’ll have a sit-down dinner at the University Center Friday night.

After Friday’s dinner, we’ll head on over to Jak’s Tap. With 40 beers on tap, Jak’s proved popular after last year’s Evening at Adler. The great news is we have the Party Room this year, with a private bar and a free pool table.

A light breakfast and full lunch is provided Saturday, culminating with dinner at Gino’s East, serving authentic Chicago-style pizza+drink.

Optional Sunday Outing at Adler

Sunday features a special optional outing to Adler, America’s first planetarium. Walking distance from University Center, geek out at the cosmos after geeking out on code.

Date+Venue+Lodging

C4 begins Friday October 20th at 7 pm, and runs through the late evening of Saturday October 21st. The Sunday Adler event is an optional event just to hang out with your fellow coders.

The conference website lists a rough timeline of events, but I’ll make another posting here with a detailed schedule.

It’s being held at the University Center, in the Chicago Loop. Check out the “lodging” section of the conference website to see nearby hotels.

Pricing+Registration

C4 costs $384.

Register by sending an email to c4@redshed.net. I’ll reply with instructions on how to complete your reservation. Attendance is capped at 75 attendees, so register sooner than later.

If you’re a smart-but-starving student, consider requesting a scholarship. Three students will receive free admission (meals included) to C4. See the “scholarship” section of the conference website for more details.

Friday, September 08, 2006
03:58 PM