We had a blast at Square! Thanks so much to Tom and his team for hosting, not to mention the pizza and drinks.
This month our talks were focused on our 2nd Annual Hack the Mac event. Jesse Peterson and James Barclay both gave great talks about Connecting tools and scripts to web interfaces and “Working with System Frameworks in Python and Objective-C.”
Our first talk was Connecting tools and scripts to web interfaces with Jesse Peterson. Jesse created a Web UI for Margarita, a web interface to reposado the Apple Software Update replication, and catalog management tool. During this talk Jesse explained and demo how simple it can be to create a Web UI. In order to participate with Jesse he asked everyone to have the following things ready to participate.
- Apache web server turned on
- Apache PHP5 and CGI modules enabled
- Permissions adjusted so you can write to the various web folders
- Munki installed (knowledge about it isn’t strictly necessary)
- An example munki repo, package and pkginfo would be helpful
- Python virtualenv installed
- A Python virtualenv at the ready with Flask installed
Jesse had three different demo’s setup for his presentation. If anyone wants to follow along further, please do not hesitate to check out his Github, Preso-webui
Next James Barclay gave his talk about Working with System Frameworks in Python and Objective-C. James let everyone know from the beginning if you attended Penn State Macadmins Conference (PSU Macadmins) you could have seen or heard about his talk. James reviewed what are system frameworks, why we should care about them, overview, of frameworks, classes, and APIs. He also gave two create demo’s about how to use all of the knowledge he imparted upon the group. James also put his slides and information on Github. If you want to see his actual talk from PSU please go to this link, PSU Youtube Talk.
Here is the Ustream in its entirety for those who want to watch.
Please note that our next meet-up will not be in the SF Bay Area, but at Day Block Brewery in Minneapolis during JNUC 2015. For all those going we look forward to seeing you there, and for those who can not attend we look forward to seeing you in November for Hack-the-Mac.
Lastly, we announced more details about our 2nd Annual Hack the Mac competition! Remember this year’s theme is “Create an application or utility that solves a common problem” with two categories:
User Facing
Admin Facing
As a reminder here are the rules and timeline of events. We have also created a dedicated space for Hack the Mac which can be found at:
macbrained.wpengine.com/hack-the-mac
Rules
MUST have a GUI
MUST provide value to many and not be too environmentally specific (open source[able])
MUST be clear and well documented
MUST be made available via Github or any other open source repository to share with the community
MUST be available to present at the November event or have a recorded video to be shown if you are in the top 3
MUST be limited to 3 or less main contributors participating on a team (this does not include shadowers)
Important Dates
Final App Submissions Due Friday, Oct. 30
Top 3 Announced Monday, Nov. 2
Top 3 Present and Winners Announced Tuesday, Nov. 17