MacHack is not your typical conference. Aside from having the keynote address start at midnight of the opening day (as just mentioned), it features all the free Jolt and Surge you care to drink, plus free pizza every night. Then there's the Bash Apple session, which was held last night (and which I also sadly had to miss due to time constraints), where the developers get to ask the attending representatives from Apple how Apple managed to screw things up so badly - all in good fun of course. You also get to hear real "geek speak" such as "You'll have to find Bob and double-click him more information" or "This code still has a lot of bare metal showing." And it has to be the only conference with an FAQ that includes the following advice:

Q. How should I select which sessions to attend?
A. Virtually no one attends the sessions, so don't sweat it.

I ignored this tongue-in-cheek advice - and was glad I did. Besides the Open Transport session already mentioned, I was treated to an introduction to using MacsBug, John Norstad's perspective on Rhapsody (as also covered on his web page), a preview of all the cool things you will be able to do with QuickTime Interactive and HyperCard 3.0, and a talk by the VirtualPC team from Connectix (where we got to see the impressive debugging version of VirtualPC that they used to actually develop and test the code).

A good time was had by all. I hope to be able to spend more time there next year.