See also: Best Hack Contest Results from MacHack '98
| Name | Author | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 180 Years of Hack | P. D. Magnus | I didn't realize that this year was a significant milestone in the history of this conference until I saw this year's coffee mug, and I'm sure many of you were the same way. I felt we would be remiss, then, if we missed this chance to look back. Tied for third place! (Youth hack) |
| 3D No 'doz II | Glenn L Austin | Demonstrates why the Mac OS is better than the "other" OS. |
| AETEGizmo | Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch | To help folks grok complex AppleEvents (like object specifiers). Take a dictionary you like, drop it onto AETEGizmo and fire up Script Editor. Now you can learn in painful detail what exactly AppleScript sends to an application without AETracker. |
| ALT_F4 | Jay D. Weiss | This is a simple faceless application that installs a JNEFilter and translates ALT-F4 (Option-F4) to Command-Q. If you are in the Finder it will call the ShutDown manager and shut the machine off. |
| asciiMac | Alexandra Ellwood & Miro Jurisic | Filters all display output and turns it into ASCII art in real time, in honor of the disturbing resemblance between the iMac and old VT100 terminals. Best Hack and winner of the coveted Victor A-Trap trophy! These MacHack newcomers from MIT wowed the crowd. |
| BrickPoint | Andy Bachorski & Nat McCully | Play BrickOut in MacsBug! |
| Chemical Physics Problems | James C. Ullrey | Solve chemical physics problems with a shareware calculator. |
| COS Emulator | Peter Abeles | Ever hear of COS? We have written a COS emulator for the Mac OS! (Youth hack) |
| Fire-IR | Eric Slosser | Increases the range and throughput of the IR port by switching the plastic fresnel lens with one that provides tighter focus, and by wiring up two (formerly) unused pins on the IR ASI to allow greater wattage. We've seen speed improvements of about 20x and range improvements of 10x (up to 100 yards). Also sets paper on fire. Eric fools 'em again in a MacHack tradition. |
| Gestalt and Battery | Allon Stern, David Kamholz & Jon Gotow | Connect an APC Smart-UPS or Back-UPS Pro to your serial port and install Gestalt and Battery. This extension activates the battery portion of the power manager letting you monitor your UPS's state as though it were a battery powered Macintosh. As a bonus, it also activates the powerbook control panel, which lets you set power conservation options. |
| iMacOS | Maf Vosburgh | This is a quick demo to show the way I think the user interface ought to look on the cool iMac. (Includes translucent menus!) |
| Interim Executive Decision (aka Steve) | Mike Webb & Marshall Vale | These technologies allow one to edit Gestalt running actively on the computer. It was designed so that Apple CEOs, ever so fleeting, could make technology decisions from the comfort of their desk. It also has the practical ability of instantly upgrading your computer. Need another processor, just add one! |
| Jobs | Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch | On Unix, jobs is a program which allows you to view processes and kill them off. On the Mac, jobs is a steve, a dcmd, kills every process except the Finder and a random Apple project. |
| KeyMacros | Paul Baxter | KeyMacros is an extenstion that turns any key on the keyboard into a macro. In this version the F10 key will produce Welcome to MacHack and F10 will produce Paul. The macros are stored in a resource. |
| Kiki's Flying Apples | Claire (Kiki) Plouff | Icons fly around the screen and into the trash. One of two hacks in the 10 year old division of the "yout" category. Kiki was also unanimously voted an informal award for "most energy per cubic centimeter". |
| LumberHack | Vikki Appleton | "I'm a Lumberjack" tunes adapted for MacHack. |
| Membuddy | Paul Baxter | Membuddy is an extension that allows an application to allocate more memmory than is what is set in its SIZE resource. It maps failed calls to NewPtr, NewPtrClear, NewHandle, NewHandleClear to use the System Heap. It keeps all allocated mem into a que and deallocates the mem when the app quits. This hack can be dangerous. |
| mhTV | Maynard Handley | This is a quick hack to demo how QuickTime movies can be rather richer than most people imagine. On a mac with a video digitizer attached, start up with the mhTV extension in the extensions folder, and open the movie "mhTV.moov noController" in a properly QuickTime aware application (eg MoviePlayer, SimpleText, Internet Explorer 4.01). The feed from the digitizer should appear in that app. |
| Mozetta | Rob Churchill, Mike Pinkerton & Eric Shapiro | Mozetta is a modification of Mozilla (the free version of NetScape Navigator 5.0) that automatically translates web pages from one language to another. Supported languages include: English, French, German, Spanish, and the ever-popular Pig Latin and Backwards. |
| NetBagels | Mark Johns & Charles Melby-Thompson | Make copies of the character "Mr. Bagelbutt" and send them dancing across monitors of computers on your AppleTalk network. (Youth hack) |
| NewtonJoker | Avi Drissman | A Portable Humor Environment (PHE) providing access to humor for the mobile proffesional. It comprises the NewtonJoker Core, which provides an access point to the environment, and Joke Packs which provide an extensible mechanism for adding and removing categories of jokes. (Youth hack) |
| OFPong | Marcus Jager & Quinn "The Eskimo" | Open Firmware is a tiny operating system built into the ROM of all Power Macintoshes that use the PCI architecture. Open Firmware actually implements a tiny Forth intepreter which allows you to write model-, OS- and processor-independent boot time device drivers. OFPong is an Open Firmware implementation of the classic "Pong" video game. It uses the boot time video and keyboard drivers to create the game display and poll the keyboard for input. Second place! |
| PalmGray | David Fedor | Lets you create/edit gray icons on a Palm device. This is of course undocumented and unsupported, though the author is from Palm Developer Support... |
| PCA Icon Arranger | Philippe Casgrain | Ever wonder if you could place your icons better in your window? Ever get tired of simply viewing "by name" or "by label"? Ever wonder if you could combine these two properties (or more) ? Take the guesswork out of this chore! This combination AppleScript/Application uses a standard Principal Components Analysis algorithm to re-arrange (plot, really) your icons in a scientifically accurate fashion, according to up to seven properties of the files and folders inside a given folder. |
| PhaseShift | Ed Wynne & Matt Slot | While years of screensaver development has resulted in a large number of *really* cool screensavers that draw pretty pictures while your computer is idle... the only problem with screensaver art is that it's modal. Enter PhaseShift -- a non-modal way to enjoy cool screensaver effects while you work. Tied for third place! |
| Reverse Mouse | Paul Baxter | This extension reverses the direction of your mouse. Move the mouse down and the cursor moves up, up is down, left is right, and right is left. This works by taking over the ADBServiceRoutine of the mouse. No patches! |
| Scared Buttons | Jerome Seydoux | Buttons are scared when the mouse moves near. A Rhapsody hack. |
| Shomi Contextual Menu | Maf Vosburgh | This is a contextual menu plugin that does a whole lot of things to images and movies. Just select a bunch of things (JPEGs, GIFs, text files, movies etc) and control click. Choose "Shomi" from the menu that appears, and it will tile the screen with the images. |
| SloppyWindows | Michael Rutman | Tired of trying to click on a scroll bar, and missing by a pixel? Do you hate the Finder bringing up 14 billion windows over your source window? So am I, so I wrote something that protects the side of your windows. A contribution from this year's MacHack chairperson. |
| Spell It - Don't Yell It! | Eric Long | There are moments when life brings its little frustrations, and often it helps to release the tension a bit. This hack allows you to express your feelings in a satisfying way, without yelling or making a scene. Spell It - Don't Yell It lets you enter a small text message, which it then proceeds to spell out on your desktop, using available icons. |
| Spotlight Hack | David Kamholz | Punches a circular "spotlight" hole through your windows so you can see the Finder desktop behind them. The spotlight tracks the cursor. You can see the desktop and icons on it, select desktop items, rename items, hit key combinations, and drag items (sort of). Fifth place! |
| Switcher 98 | Mike Neil & Leonard Rosenthol | Andy Hertzfeld's original "Switcher" updated for 1998 from two MacHack oldtimers and. |
| Talking Keyboard | Paul Baxter | This hack is designed to assist people with disabilities but is fun for everyone to use. It makes the keyboard speak char by char, word by word, sentence by sentence, or any combination of all three. |
| The Crash Manager | Jude Giampaolo | The feature that Apple forgot! Apple has been busy adding the Appearance Manager and themes for future OSs. They have given you the ability to customize your computer. But the computer still crashes in the same way. Now this has changed! With the Crash Manager you can select a theme crash! |
| They Killed Kenny! | Alex Michev & Andy Furnas | Plays a random "They Killed Kenny - the Bastards!" movie clip from South Park whenever an application quits. (Sorry, you must supply your own clips!) One of two hacks in the 10 year old division of the "yout" category. |
| SpokenSerial | Chris Espinosa & Steve Sisak | A demonstration of transport-independent speech. An application to receive spoken text in hexadecimal, and post keyboard events to the frontmost application. The demonstration includes driving one Mac from another via the microphone, RCA cables, walkie-talkies, and tin cans and strings. A contribution from our keynote speaker! |
| WackyWindows | Paul Baxter | This is an extension that makes your windows fly all over the screen and play sounds when a window is either opened or closed. |
| Whare've you been lately? | Eric Traut & Darin Adler | Look at actual PowerPC instructions as they are being executed by your computer. Written during the hack contest by two very smart friends. |
| Y2K | Simon Fraser, John Kalb & John McMullen | This extension purports to be a fix for Y2K (year 2000) problems on the Macintosh. Of course, there are no Y2K problems on the Macintosh, so fixing this does not really entail much... But it does something else... and that is a surprise. It is harmless, so why don't you install it and see if you can guess what it did? |
| Y2K-OK | Bob Spence & Brian Hamlin | As the Year 2000 approaches, this INIT will slowly move back the hands of time. Keep that Bad 'ol Year 2000 at Bay, forever ! |