O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference Report

Mac developers, system administrators, digital musicians, and users were treated to a thorough exploration of Mac OS X's past, present, and future at the third O'Reilly Mac OS X Conference, which took place in Santa Clara, CA from October 25-28. Over 500 attendees filled sessions examining the many aspects and applications of Mac OS X: a Tiger preview, digital forensics, Podcasting, AppleScript, GarageBand, Mac hacks for the home, Mac OS X in a Unix environment, creating digital music, and much more.

In addition to tracks devoted to the needs of programmers and sys admins, two new tracks debuted at this year's conference. The Insanely Great Mac track focused on cool and useful applications in mobile computing, home automation, creative networking, and digital media. The Digital Audio track, for musicians and tech gurus, explored fine tuning Macs for peak performance, designing workflows to manage huge amounts of content, how to work with professional applications, and how to get new music in front of audiences.

Just a few of the notable conference participants included Stewart Copeland, the former drummer for the Police who now creates award-winning film and television scores using Mac OS X technology; New York Times columnist David Pogue; Andy Hertzfeld of Folklore.org; Chris Bourdon and Wiley Hodges, Apple's Tiger experts; Karelia Sofware's Dan Wood; audio for gaming guru Clint Bajakian; Brent Simmons of Ranchero Software; Michael Bartosh of 4AM Media; and authors Niel Bornstein, Gordon Meyer, and Ted Landau.

Other conference highlights include:

• Winners of the second Mac OS X Innovators Contest were introduced. First Place in the U.S. category went to "Delicious Library" from Delicious Monster Software, which lets users create a home or office lending library of books, movies, music, and video games. In the International category, First Place went to "FotoMagico" from Boinx Software, which allows users to create live presentations and complex slideshows with pictures from an iPhoto Library
• Andy Ihnatko took attendees on a riotous virtual tour of his treasure vault (a.k.a. unit 227 at Uncle Bob's Self-Stor) of the gizmos and jetsam he's saved and created throughout the years
• Sean Fitzroy and Vikki Merriman detailed their experience of using Mac OS X to create the film which won the 2003 Boston 48 Hour Film Project
• Apple Developer Connection once again stocked its Airport Extreme Lounge with the latest Apple hardware for conference attendees to test drive, and hosted an evening reception to bring conference participants together informally

Get further details on this O'Reilly web page.