Sebastopol, CA--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. "We added a digital audio track to this conference because we believe there are opportunities for developers in this arena," noted conference program chair Derrick Story. "At the moment, the iPod and ITMS are grabbing the headlines. But a more complete understanding of the audio process--from how it's created, managed, distributed, and consumed--can lead to further innovation in this area."
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:
"If you ask folks who attended the Mac OS X Conference about what they liked, I'm sure many of them will say that it was as much about connecting with others in the Mac community as it was the technology itself," concluded Story. "I had countless interactions with speakers and attendees that reminded me how much I truly like these people."
Additional Resources:
For information on exhibition and sponsorship opportunities at O'Reilly conferences, contact Andrew Calvo at (707) 827-7176, or andrewc@oreilly.com.
For more information on Mac-related issues, visit the O'Reilly Mac DevCenter.
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