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2004 Showcase Demos

Here are the entries for the 2004 Showcase. Note that these are all written in three days or less, most take advantage of strange and undocumented methods of accessing your computer. In all likelihood, they won't run at all, and any that do run will, without a doubt, cause your computer to catch fire, will kick your dog, or do something else so hideously awful that you would be foolish to even look at the source code, much less install and run the things. If you ignore the above advice, at the very least back up all your data, keep a fire extinguisher handy, and don't let the dog into the room. You have been warned, and neither the individuals who wrote the entries nor the ADHOC volunteers nor Expotech will take any blame or liability for the terrible, terrible things that will happen to you when you do what you're about to do.

BadBadThing 0.1

Copyright 2004 Chris Adamson invalidname@mac.com

BadBadThing captures pixels from the DVD Player application and compresses them into the video track of a QuickTime movie (using the MPEG-4 video codec).

It uses QuickTime for Java and several helper AppleScripts to handle the Java-to-DVD-Player communication.

Run with "java BadBadThing" from the command line.

For amusement purposes only. Don't steal flicks.

--Chris

EtherPEG

EtherPEGCocoa

EtherPEGSaver

Jonathan "Wolf" Rentzsch

EULB Extension Program

This is an installer that lets those who don't have the good fortune of owning an iBook with a defect logic board to show their solidarity.

It also contains a free gift.

Uli Kusterer, (c) 2004. Freeware. http://www.zathras.de

Expose Hopper

Adam Goldstein

FrodoFinder

by Dick Furnas

Command line utility FrodoFinder locates members of the Baggins Family in a given state or area code.

Requires connection to the web.

invoke from the FrodoFinder directory:

blarina ~/FrodoFinder mcp% ./FrodoFinder MI
2:   Bilbo and Frodo Baggins - (248) 258-5167 - , Bloomfield Hills, MI 48301 - 
blarina ~/FrodoFinder mcp%

This is a shell script wrapper for a useful set of command line scripts I wrote to search google for residential and business phone numbers.

The script Phone in the bin directory when invoked by the name Residence searches the google residential directory. The Business link searches the business directory.

the command-line text browser lynx must be installed.

lynx is available with fink.

Magic 8 Ball

Robby Rau

MailToOnCrash

A simple input manager. Install it. Then, if an app crashes, and it has the key "MailToOnCrash" in its Info.plist, then the app's crash report will be mailed to that email address.

Share and enjoy.

Avi, 7/23/04

Megaman Effect

By Mike Zornek

The MegaManEffect is a application that emulates an effect seen in the classic NES game Mega Man 2. When you launch an OS X application, the screen goes dark, stars sweep the night sky and your applicationÕs icon is presented in a blue letter box bar with a cheesy 8-bit music introduction.

Neko Returns

By Jonathan Johnson

Started at 9:45 the night of the Hack Show, Neko the Cat returns. Neko is the little cute cat that runs around your screen chasing a ball. However, why not chase the mouse?

Not only does it chase the mouse, but it will grab your mouse if you let it. Click the mouse, and you will startle Neko, and it will run away. But don't rest for long, because it will quickly try to catch the mouse again.

It is written in REALbasic, and utilizes two free plugins. CaptureScreen from http://www.strout.net/ and another one written by me the night of the contest. The source file, not plugins, are included in the Source folder.

Feel free to email me at jon@maccoding.com if you have any questions/comments.

Not "The Same Old Trash"

By Will Pazner

Launch the Trash Effect Selector, and select the effect you want from the popup menu. Click "Save".

Move the Trash.ape file to your Applications Enhancers directory, and restart the Finder.

In the Terminal, type:

killall "Finder"

Or in AppleScript:

tell application "Finder"
    quit
end tell

(Click on Finder icon in Dock)

Open the Trash window by clicking on the dock icon. Select Finder >> Empty TrashÉ

Rumor Mill

by Pure Evil Software (Geoff Adams and Brian J. Geiger)

Inspired by Rumor Monger (Apple, circa 1990) by Harry Chesley. More at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?RumorMonger and http://static.userland.com/userLandDiscussArchive/msg011064.html

From the SubEthaEdit reporting on the Showcase:

Brian: Rumor Mill is a peer to peer persistant messaging application. The purpose is to spread rumors across a company subnet with no way of stopping those rumors. Ideally, subversion is the key, as one would expect from Pure Evil Software. It had some problems on some people's computers, but that should be fixed tomorrow for the hack CD. Failing that, check [http://www.subluminal.com/] for updates. Scott Knaster: The original helped end the career and marriage of an Apple exec. Brian: So my chances for a job at apple are limited, I'd imagine.

Rumor Mill is a Cocoa Application that uses Rendezvous to find other peers on the network. It passes any rumors around without attaching names to the rumor submitter, and keeps no track of where the rumor started. It was written in the 24 hours prior to the Labs Showcase, and neither of the programmers (Geoff Adams and Brian J. Geiger) had ever done Cocoa/Obj. C work before. Nor, indeed, Rendezvous.

Scroll Plate

Lisa

SmartMouth

Evan Rolloffs

Showcase Voting App Readme

by Chris Erbach

Insert schema.sql into your MySQL database and configure the settings at the top of initstuff.php. Enjoy!

SpellingB

David Steinbrunner

Stupid Shell Tricks 2004

Lucius Kwok

Talkicity

Adrian Botez, Uli Kusterer

Talkicity uses the mac's speech recognition to give animated pictures lifelike(!) personalities.

for amusement purposes only.

Unsummarize 1.0b1

Not Copyright. Public Domaion. No rights reserved. by Jorg Brown, with heaps of thanks for Sanford Selznick

I was at MacHack trying to think of a hack. David Pogue gavce the keynote, which was funny, though, not informative. He mentioned the "Summarize" service, which was a nice piece of work, but not that useful. Really, a good hack in a way. Thing is, I don't really need to summarize what I've just written.

Really, what I want to do is write a summary, and have the computer come up with all the details.

The Unsummarize service does that.

To use it, you need to drag Unsummarize into your /System/Library/Services folder, and you'll need to edit your existing SummarizeService to give it a command-key equivalent. That equivalent must be command-'. To do this you'll need to add the following lines to the Info.plist file in SummaryService.app:

                    <key>NSKeyEquivalent</key>
                    <dict>
                            <key>default</key>
                            <string>&apos;</string>
                    </dict>

You should add these lines immediately before the line that says NSMenuItem.

You'll need to install lynx, because it's the mechanism by which we fetch URL data. Unsummarize invokes lynx via /usr/local/bin/lynx. If you need to install that, go to http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/unixopensource/lynx.html

Then you'll need to log out, and log back in, and unsummarize away!

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Last updated 2006-03-29