Melancholy and the infinite MacHack
I was browsing the Ars Apple Blog this morning, which linked to a story saying this would be the last ADHOC (formerly MacHack) conference, which just finished up the other day:
At the end of this year's ADHOC Conference, Expotech announced that this was the last conference. Due to dropping attendance, higher expenses, and fewer sponsors, the show could no longer be sustained.The decline began in 2003 when Apple moved WWDC to the week following MacHack, which resulted in some last minute cancellations. In 2004 the name was changed to ADHOC in an attempt to attract a wider audience and the date was also changed to occur following WWDC. MacHack had its own culture and traditions, and was as much a social & networking event as an opportunity to learn & show off neat tricks.
I'm still sort of hoping this isn't really true, and still sort of hoping my feelers won't get back to me. Expotech, the company that's behind them, barely has a site to speak of, and there isn't anything on the PR page of Adhoc just yet.
Unfortunately, it has some of the ring of truth to it. Awhile ago all of the expos and exhibitions came under a grind, and when Apple started changing shows around it messed the Mac-specific ones up bad and they've never really recovered (Some would say there was more they could have done perhaps, but it's hard to put show like this together under ideal conditions).
Probably one of the better descriptions of ADHOC I've heard (or at least the most recent) was from Jonathan Rentzsch back in the Red Shed interview, where he said:
Adhoc is about one thing: coolness. It has four facets:
- Cool people
- Talking about cool stuff (papers/sessions)
- Showing off cool ideas (hacks)
- Coming up with your own cool ideas and trying to get them working (your hack(s))
That's it. It's very informal, most of it made up on the fly, by really smart people whom you can communicate with at very high bandwidth. Unlike WWDC, which is Apple's firehose, Adhoc is a distributed firehose about what your peers think is cool, not just what Apple thinks is cool.
Rentz also has a nice little introduction at his site that gives some more feel at the site (I'm kicking myself for forgetting to post it), and there are some other MacHack memories within that interview. If it's true, it's a really sad thing all around, as ADHOC was really a one-of-a-kind institution for Mac coders and the technically minded, and so many cool hacks and relationships would come out of that show every year.
There are hacker-conventions and such that take place elsewhere, but they don't really capture the charm and spirit that MacHack seemed to pull together every year. I tip my coffee to them, and if it turns out to be true, will be tipping a glass of something else to them tonight.
Posted by drunkenbatmanAugust 01, 2005, at 08:34 AM
Comments (9)
Posted by: Paul Mison at August 1, 2005 10:57 AM
I know the Web isn't everything, but ADHOC/MacHack always seems to have been damned near invisible. Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, but I've heard nothing about the talks at the conference, who the best people were there, or even the hacks (with the exception of the MegaManEffect hack, as seen on delicious).
Perhaps the keep-going-all-night atmosphere is inimical to documenting the event, but you can't expect people to turn up to a conference they've not heard about. Having said that, and having heard about it, it seems like a shame that there's no alternative to WWDC any more (with O'Reilly's Mac OS X conference apparently not happening either, assuming I'm not missing something else).
Posted by: Mike Zornek at August 1, 2005 01:39 PM
I was on the planning committee this year and I wanted to mentioned that we did have a PR person and we did send out Press Releases to the Mac web. Why they didn't cover them I don't know, but there was PR.
We also had lots of lunch flyers at WWDC to help spread the word as well.
Anyways, we did try to get the word out, but it's hard since most (and by most I think I mean all) of the people who do this are volunteers and you can only ignore the grumpy landlord for so long before spending your time on for-pay gigs.
I do hope something else is born to fill the empty space MacHack is leaving. I have had an unforgettable time there the last three years.
Posted by: Skatch at August 1, 2005 02:56 PM
From what I've heard over the years, it sounded like a great conference. I always wished they would make all the cool hacks available on the web. I think that would have been the best publicity. As it is, it always seems like the conference happens, if you keep your ear to the ground you hear about a few of the cool things that went on, and that's it. The "rest of us" never get more of a taste. I know, I know, the rest of us didn't pay to go, but putting up a website with the hacks would buy a lot of free publicity.
Posted by: Brian J. Geiger at August 1, 2005 03:39 PM
The past couple of years worth of hacks are on the web, as are the papers. I'll have this year's up once I get them.
Incidentally, we weren't completely invisible, but we were easy to miss, especially if you're not a developer. There was my article on macdevcenter.com, lots of links from macmegasite.com, and the rare link from maccentral.com. There was even a brief link from slashdot, though only through an Ask Slashdot, so not on their main page, because slashdot mostly does not link to conferences.
Plus there were a couple of posts to apple's cocoa developer lists, but only a couple, so as not to spam. If you check the latest issue of MacTech magazine, you'll see a huge ad on Page 3, but that came out a little closer to the conference than we might have otherwise hoped. There were even press releases from companies like REAL Software and MarkSpace.
So we tried, but we certainly had no advertising budget. So it goes.
Posted by: Darrin at August 2, 2005 01:10 AM
I didn't attend the last 2 years because I had other conferences I needed to budget for that were important for me to attend. But I've really missed it. I went to SIGGRAPH last year and am there again this week, and while it's great and there's lots of cool stuff to learn, it's also much more lonely. You don't interact nearly as much with the other conference-goers as you did at MacHack. I really miss that. I'm not meeting new people at SIGGRAPH the way I did at MacHack because there's no late-night coding sessions in the atrium, etc.
Posted by: Craig Turner at August 2, 2005 03:20 AM
I'm a WebObjects developer in Australia and was looking to branch out and meet people involved in mac development. While it's quite the same focus as adhoc is/was, I'm coming over to the US for the September Openbase conference because there seem to be more than a few cool people heading that way, and lots of useful lectures. And an orchestra with dinner each night (!!).
Posted by: Skatch at August 2, 2005 04:59 AM
>The past couple of years worth of hacks are on the web, as are the papers.
Oops. I stand corrected.
Posted by: Frogbutt at August 11, 2005 11:06 AM
Why is anyone surprised? This was inevitable. As soon as they changed the name from MacHack to "ADHOC", they lost the soul of the conference.
It's true. I was the Chair for the last conference, and Expotech will not be putting on a conference next year. We'll have something up soon, but the conference is very exhausting, so people will likely want to catch up on sleep first. (You can email my address from the contact web page on ADHOC's site if you'd like to verify.)
There may still be hope, as there are talks of trying to get someone else to pick up the conference, or maybe doing a Flash Mob style conference, but as of now, MacHack 20 will be the last.