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President's Letter - Conference and Election Plans

Anthony Meadow

MADA's 1991 MacApp Conference in Phoenix was a success, with over 200 in attendance for a full program of outstanding tutorials and presentations. Based on feedback gathered from Phoenix, we have a few improvements in mind for next year's conference.

At the 1992 MacApp Conference, Apple-primarily the MacApp team-will have an entire day for their presentations, with no competing sessions. The overall format for the conference will be two days of tutorials and workshops, the one day of Apple-only presentations, plus one and a half days of other presentations-tools, interesting ways to use MacApp, etc.

The conference will end on Friday around noon so that everyone has time to get to the airport. The entire conference area will be non-smoking since the majority of our members don't smoke.

As much as we'd like conference presenters to turn in their materials so they can be duplicated for the conference, it's not going to happen. Many presenters work on their materials right up to the last minute. Literally! This is the same problem Apple has with the Worldwide Developers Conference. Our solution in Phoenix was the Conference CD- ROM, made possible due to many hours of Arvid Jedlicka's "spare time." Please send us feedback on the CD-ROM so we'll know what to do in future conferences-link MADA with your comments and suggestions.

UPCOMING CONFERENCE LOCATIONS

The 1992 MacApp Conference will be held in a very nice hotel in Orlando, Florida, thanks to Kurt Schmucker of Apple's Advanced Technology Group. The 1993 MacApp Conference will be in San Diego, California. We'll be negotiating with hotels soon; we hope to get a lower room rate and avoid the problems we had in Phoenix.

We are investigating the possibility of an additional MacApp Conference in Europe. To minimize the financial risk to MADA, it would be only 2 or 3 days long and would be held just before or after the 1992 German Apple Developers Conference. If it's successful, we could try to alternate between France and Germany each year.

UPCOMING ELECTIONS

The board of directors met during Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference in May. We decided that elections and the installation of the board of directors should be synchronized with MADA's annual MacApp Conference. This means the term of office for the next election will be only six months. Following this election, the term of office will revert to one year.

We'd like to encourage people to run for office. The board does not meet in person very often; in fact, the meeting in May was the first time that every board member was present at a single meeting. Most of the board's business is handled electronically over AppleLink.

NEW PRODUCTS

MADA's latest products are the FrameWorks Disk subscription and the '91 MacApp Conference CD-ROM. Please let us know what you think about them. We'd also like to receive suggestions for other products that you think MADA should create.