MacHeist

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MacHeist logo created by Adam Betts.

MacHeist was a six week long event which ran at the end of 2006 and raised US$200,000 for charity. The event was coordinated by Phillip Ryu, John Casasanta, Scott Meinzer, Adam Betts, and Chiraag Mundhe and followed on from a previous endeavour, My Dream App.

Originally an invite-only event, it later became open to the entire Macintosh community. The online event was a series of puzzles in which visitors to the site were provided with cryptic clues to decipher or track down obscure websites to retrieve details to send back to MacHeist. Once completed, the player would receive Mac shareware applications as a reward.

At the end of the event, a US$49 bundle of applications was offered to the public, while MacHeist players who collected bundle discounts received a US$10 discount only if they completed all of the heists, as each official heist gave a US$2 bundle discount.

1 Heists
2 Hubert
3 Bundle
4 Criticism
5 Clones
6 References
7 Footnotes
8 External links

[edit] Heists

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Heist 0.5: 12 mac sites had mini Hubert buttons hidden on their pages. The "Hubert chase" is covered under the Hubert section of this page.

Heist 1: Contact Billy Hull, (a member of the Apple PR team), and retrieve information regarding the rumoured iPhone and submit the information to Apple gossip site MacRumors. On completion of this mission, members received Assignment Planner, Chat Transcript Manager, Soulver as well as a US$2 discount on the eventual bundle.

Heist 1.5: Based on multiple feeds from the MacHeist website. When the two feeds were placed together they made a complete paragraph which made reference to American History Lux. Inside the application, (which had been given away in a lead-up mission), there was a link to the website of Billy Hull. Hidden on the site was a code which was used to retrieve the loot from MacHeist. On completion of this mission, members received American History Lux, Notepad Widget, and Quickscale. American History Lux and Notepad Widget had already been given out as part of the initial pre-heist.

Heist 2: Based on a statement from a supposed Mac software cracking community member announcing his permanent retirement. The statement contained intentional spelling mistakes which led to an audio file on a website containing morse code. When decoded this led to mercatorlovr.com, which contained coordinates for Google Earth. The buildings/roads on the map formed the letters "C U B I S M", which when used as a password on the initial website would lead to a print out of an Origami cube that had numbers on it. These numbers were the code to retrieve the loot from MacHeist. On completion of this mission, members received 1Passwd, Cha-Ching, and a US$2 discount on the bundle.

Heist 2.5: Started as a series of links pointing at http://macheist.com/stuckintheamazon/ appeared on the MacHeist site. The page displayed a picture of a document on the Mac OS Classic desktop with a document showing the lyrics to "Police & Thieves" by The Clash. When the words "things", "get", "better", "over", and "time" were dragged into the Trash Can, the site morphed into a Mac OS X desktop which would lead to the loot. On completion of this mission, members received Alarm Clock Pro.

Heist 3: Members were presented with an iCard, which contained four images which could be described as, "based in two states". On the website basedintwostates.com a message in red binary was shown, and could be translated to lookbeyondthered.com. The site contained the message "Pulsing lights turn me on" referring to the earlier basedintwostates.com. It also contained a link to the app GhettoSight Certain digits were then flashing, and could be decoded as "Sometimes we need to look at things in the other direction". Reversing the binary on the site led to the message, (and its corresponding site), pastapalebluedot.com. The page title of the page was "What would Messier do?", and the page contained pictures of a whirlpool, dumbbell, cigar, owl and sunflower, the names of five of the Messier objects. The corresponding messier numbers 5127829763 when called would result in the message "Find the image tagged the scarlet letter. use something delicious if you have to." On the social bookmarking web service del.icio.us, a link to a flickr photostream containing an image which when viewed using the GhettoSight application would reveal the code used to retrieve the loot from MacHeist. On completion of this mission, members received iPulse, DrawIt, and a US$2 discount on the bundle.

Heist 3.5: Started as line in the MacHeist RSS Feed, which quoted from Alice in Wonderland. Printing out the message from the briefings page, showed a set of numbers that corresponded to pages, lines, and words in the Lewis Carroll book. The words in order were, "Follow the white rabbit" at http://macheist.com/followthewhiterabbit, there was a picture of the white rabbit which when saved and opened in a text editor would show a link to http://macheist.com/followthewhiterabbit/deeper/anddeeper/ which would lead to the loot. On completion of this mission, members received To Do Tracker, and Picture Framer. Also available for download was Cypher, an exclusive application created by MacMage for MacHeist.

Heist 4: First, members had to download a Kracker application from MacHeist. They then had to go to the developers page, http://austinsarner.com, and download the NetConnect.framework which was then added into the Kracker application. MacZOT had to be pinged in terminal and then the IP that comes up had to be entered into the Kracker appliation. The IP was: 64.38.44.157. They then had to input the Kerberos port 88 and run Kracker. The output came after an old computer game sound (they figured out which) and is aapz4p. The members had to then log in at http://maczot.com/panel/ with the nick: apps and the password: aapz4p. They had to send an email using the program, and wait for reply. In the private messages on MacHeist, they received a code. On completion of this mission, members received Mac Pilot, and a US$2 discount on the bundle.

Heist 5: Started as pieces of a jigsaw puzzle spread across various independent application developers, when put together they made the URL to thelaststepsarethehardestonestotake.com, which had a broken image on the page. In the source-code of the page, the image is shown to be hosted on an FTP server which when accessed had a file which could be copied and pasted into the tips section of the MacUpdate Tip Submission page. Members would receive a code via email that would lead to the loot. On completion of this mission, members received EarthDesk, PhotoStickies, and a US$2 discount on the bundle.

Heist 6: Yet to happen as of February 2007 according to MacHeist web site.

[edit] Hubert

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Hubert is the mascot of MacHeist. He was created by graphic designer Hugo van Heuven, and was customised by many of the users of MacHeist for their forum avatar. Hubert originally appeared on 12 Mac-related websites as a small 32x32 pixel button icon eventually linking to website whoishubert.com. On completion of this mini-heist, members received two shareware programs, American History Lux and Notepad Widget.

[edit] Bundle

The end bundle was US$49, and was available to the entire Mac community. The end bundle contained Delicious Library, FotoMagico, ShapeShifter, DEVONthink Personal, Disco, Rapidweaver, iClip, choice of 1 Pangea Software game (Bugdom 2, Enigmo 2, Nanosaur 2, Pangea Arcade), Newsfire (was added to the bundle when charity donations reached US$50,000) and TextMate (planned to be added when donations reached US$100,000, but added at around US$70,000 instead).

25% of the bundle purchase was donated to one or all of the following charities: United Way International, Direct Relief International, AIDS Research Alliance, Cancer Research and Prevention Foundation, Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund, Hunger Project and Save the Children.

MacHeist took in nearly US$800,000 through sales of 16,821 bundles, netting US$190,000 for charity, to which the MacHeist organisers added another US$10,000 to make it an even US$200,000.

[edit] Criticism

MacHeist was criticized by some members of the Mac community, most notably John Gruber of the Daring Fireball blog,^[1] Paul Kafasis of Rogue Amoeba software,^[2] and Gus Mueller of Flying Meat software.^[3] Some independent Mac software developers who chose not to participate in MacHeist felt that the proclamation from the MacHeist organisers that it was "The Week of the Independent Mac Developer" were an inappropriate form of marketing. While exact numbers are not known to the public, Gruber and others questioned the value of the promotion to the participating developers, citing the offers made to developers of around US$5,000 per developer, whereas the MacHeist bundle grossed nearly US$800,000. According to Gruber, it's likely that the net profits for the MacHeist team far exceeded the total charity donation and the cuts paid to participating developers combined. Additionally, some thought that setting goals to "unlock" NewsFire and TextMate in terms of dollars raised for charity was deceptive and unethical.

[edit] Clones

Many users of MacHeist have teamed up to create their own versions of it. Many of them simply created one or two heists, but some, like theAmazon (http://whatistheamazon.com/), are still creating heists. People are also currently speculating about MacHive (http://machive.com/), which is also created by a MacHeist user. You can see a few of these Unofficial Heists at http://mhwiki.channelblue.net/wiki/User_Heists.