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Speakers

Biographies

Michael Brian Bentley

Bio forthcoming

Scott Collins

Bio forthcoming

Adam C Engst

Adam C. Engst is the publisher of TidBITS, one of the oldest and largest Internet-based newsletters, distributed weekly to hundreds of thousands of readers. He has written and co-authored numerous Internet books, including the best-selling Internet Starter Kit series, and many articles for magazines, including Macworld, where he is currently a Contributing Editor. His innovations include the creation of the first advertising program to support an Internet publication in 1992 and the first flat-rate SLIP accounts for graphical Internet access in 1993 (with Northwest Nexus for Internet Starter Kit for Macintosh). In addition, he has collaborated on several Internet educational videos and has appeared on a variety of internationally broadcast television and radio programs. His indefatigable support of the Macintosh community and commitment to helping users has resulted in numerous awards and recognition at the highest levels. In the annual MDJ Power 25 survey of industry insiders, he ranked as the second (2000) and third (2001) most influential person in the Macintosh industry, and he was named one of MacDirectory's top ten visionaries. And how many industry figures can boast of being turned into an action figure?

Brian J Geiger

Brian J. Geiger started out his professional career as a game programmer on the Atari Jaguar. That sufficiently scarred him, so he left that work and went into Project Management. He especially enjoys allowing people to do the work they love, rather than the work they have to do, so he gears his management style towards optimizing that. One of his key ways of removing the drudgery is by increasing automation and removing roadblocks. You can see some of his thoughts on his web site.

Jonathan Hoyle

Jonathan Hoyle has been a Mac-fanatic since 1986 when he was in Grad School studying Mathematics at the University of Michigan. He is a Software Developer with cross-platform experience with both Windows and Macintosh, although the Mac is all he would ever want to own. He is also a major geek when it comes to Superman comic books and trivia. Over the years, Jonathan has worked on various projects including being part of the team that wrote the Forensic DNA software used to identify the victims of the World Trade Center attacks on 9/11. Today, Jonathan is a Macintosh Software Developer with Eastman Kodak in Rochester, NY, where he lives with his wife, Mary, and are looking forward to becoming first-time parents in September.

Jonathan Johnson

Jonathan Johnson is a programmer for REAL Software, creators of REALbasic which is an easy-to-use, cross-platform software development environment. Starting out in his childhood with HyperCard, Jon moved onto C and C++, Java, and Objective-C, until he finally settled on REALbasic. Today, he specializes in Mac OS X development, but also contributes to REALbasic on Windows and Linux regularly.

Scott Knaster

Scott Knaster has been writing about Macs for as long as there have been Macs. Scott's books How To Write Macintosh Software and Macintosh Programming Secrets were required reading for Mac programmers for more than a decade and were translated into several languages, including Japanese and Pascal. Scott has every issue of Mad magazine, which explains a lot about him.

Dave Koziol

Dave Koziol has been developing Mac software for over 15 years, and attending MacHack for just a long, including two separate years as conference chairman. The last few years he's been working on software to support all manner of hardware on Mac OS X, and has previous worked on a variety of cross platform applications. He is President of Arbormoon Software, Inc.

Bob Kuehne

Bob Kuehne co-founded Blue Newt Software in 2001 - a software development and consulting company that teaches, designs, and implements high-performance cross-platform OpenGL and scenegraph technologies for clients around the world. Prior to Blue Newt, Bob worked at SGI for nearly eight years doing shader compiler development, writing scalable software, and consulting with software developers on ways to maximize performance. When he's not absorbing and disseminating OpenGL goodies, he digs (pun intended) playing volleyball until his knees ache. Bob is author of the forthcoming book: OpenGL for Mac OS X, out later this year by Addison-Wesley.

Lisa Lippincott

Lisa Lippincott designs hot new internet technology, even now that it's unfashionable. Since 1996 she's been designing it at BigFix, finding ways to deliver information about computer problems to people who have problematic computers. She's known for her C++ language lawyering, for her award-winning hack "Unfinder," and, less widely, for her work in mathematical logic and computational number theory.

Chad Magendanz

Chad Magendanz has been a Mac enthusiast undercover within Microsoft for the last 10 years. Most recently, he managed the Windows Hardware Design Group, the team responsible for driving user research and prototyping efforts that provoke new thinking in form factors and interaction design. In this role, he delivered Windows hardware design guidelines, hardware reference specifications, hardware development kits, and integrated system prototypes with industry partners. In the Windows XP era, he designed and managed Windows visuals, shell navigation, file management, media integration, CD burning, Web publishing, and broad partner engagement, including ISV evangelism events and pre-launch briefings for congress and state attorney generals on new XP features. Prior to that, he was chief technical liaison between Microsoft and Apple Computer, responsible for Mac Office shared components and common user interface elements. In his spare time, he wrote ShrinkWrap, a freeware disk image utility purchased by Aladdin Systems in ‘95.

Will Pazner

Will Pazner, a Macintosh enthusiast, will be attending his fourth MacHack/ADHOC Conference. Will has spent considerable time hacking Mac OS using command-line tools, C, Java, and Scheme.

Shawn Platkus

Shawn Platkus is currently a senior software engineer at Xitron, Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan. At Xitron, he works on XiFlow, a cross platform client / server workflow system for the printing industry. Shawn has been developing commercial software for over fifteen years and has worked on high profile products at companies including Compuware Corporation and Open Text.

Maurita Plouff

Maurita Plouff has been translating between technical and non-technical audiences for more than 30 years, starting with her first technical post as a research assistant in a physics laboratory, and has continued in a variety of fields ever since. An accomplished speaker, she is known for her ability to avoid inducing the "glassy-eyed stare".

Maurita has been a technologist, manager, corporate subversive, troubleshooter, surveyor, minor executive, semi-pro singer, cartographer, technical geek, consultant, and chef. She has been on the faculty at SANS and USENIX/LISA conferences as well as teaching public and private courses in technical and professional development topics. She holds both B.S. and M.M. degrees and, when in the kitchen, prefers a 6.5-wide Henckels 4-star knife.

Ryan Rempel

Bio forthcoming

Scott Ribe

Scott Ribe got his hands on an Apple II in 7th grade and hasn't stopped developing software since then. Along the way he's picked up an MIT CS degree, and experiencewith several operating systems and a ridiculous number of languages and tools. Right now his most interesting work is developing great Mac software for electronic medicalrecords.

Eric Shapiro

Eric Shapiro has been writing Mac software since before time itself existed. He has taught Mac development seminars, worked on numerous Mac applications, wrote two popular hacks (VideoBeep and The Grouch), wrote articles for Byte and MacTech magazines, and co-wrote several short MacHack movies with John Ardussi. Eric has managed several cross-platform development projects ranging from VideoBeep to a streaming media protection system. He is President of Relium Corp, a consulting and custom programming company, and is currently working on Mark/Space's Missing Sync products.

Ravi Singh

Ravi Singh is a contract programmer specializing in plugin development amd graphics , sound , and image processing applications for OSX and Win32 environments. His company RavWare Software has authored dozens of ActiveX controls, and plugins for Director , Freehand, Photoshop, and other applications. Ravi has written articles and reviews for Visual Developer magazine and presented at several development conferences.

Dori Smith

Dori Smith is author of the upcoming "Dashboard Widgets for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide" and the bestselling "Java 2: Visual QuickStart Guide," co-author (with Tom Negrino) of "JavaScript: Visual QuickStart Guide, 5e" and "Mac OS X Unwired," and numerous print and online magazine articles. She is a frequent speaker at industry conferences, and is Publisher and ListMom for the Wise-Women's Web Community. Dori is also a member of the Web Standards Project Steering Committee and maintains the Backup Brain weblog.

Lindsey Spratt

I am a computer programmer and systems architect with interests in many areas--I particularly enjoy working on problems that no one is sure how to solve. I am currently working on the XGP project, a combination of Cocoa, ObjectiveC, and gprolog on the Macintosh. For the last 8 years I've been developing the SetFlow analytics system at five companies, beginning with Digital Archaeology and ending up with Serena Software.

George Storm

George Storm has been a Macintosh developer since six months after it's release. Prior to his programming experience he worked for more than ten years in electronic R&D in a wide variety of disciplines. He holds three patents for mechanical devices related to handicapped access and recently built his first robot based on the bTop-1 and a Mac Mini.

Mark Szymczyk

After graduating from John Carroll University, Mark Szymczyk set out on a career in software development. He found his niche in game devlopment, starting his own shareware game company, Black Apple Software. His articles for the iDevGames Web site led to a request to write Mac Game Programming.

Ryan Wilcox

Ryan Wilcox is the president of Wilcox Development Solutions (http://www.wilcoxd.com), a Pennsylvania company involved in cross-platform application development using wxWidgets, programming OS X with PyObjC, website development, and database programming. The first two of those topics he's given talks about at ADHOC (2003 and 2004 respectively.) Outside of computers, he finds himself immersed in far too many (or far too few) things to mention here.

Gordon Worley

Gordon Worley is working on his PhD in computer science at the University of Central Florida. In what little spare time the department affords him, he is actively involved in the transhumanist and Singularitarian communities. And on those rare occasions when he has time off, he watches cooking shows and sips icy-frozen-slush-type drinks.

Mike Zornek

Mike Zornek is a web developer by day and a Cocoa developer by night. He currently works for the American Society of Media Photographers where he maintains a web-based membership management database he built for them in 2004. At night Mike is bootstrapping his own software company which will be selling applications for Mac OS X, the first of which is a tool fellow web developers. Finally, you can also spot Mike helping run the Philadelphia Apple Developers group which meets monthly.

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Last updated 2006-03-29