OOPSLA submission ideas for Mac people

I had intended to kind of take a break from OOPSLA this year. I've been on the committee for the past few years, and I wanted to have a year where I didn't focus so much on it. But it's winter, and my mind automatically turns to thoughts of OOPSLA because the first submission deadline is coming up in March.

OOPSLA was the original conference devoted to all things related to object-oriented programming. The scope has increased to include programming, patterns, and paradigms. It's about looking at the big problems that is facing software, ranging from reliability to ultra-large scale systems.

I'd love to see a greater Mac presence there. There's plenty of Mac users who attend, but not a lot of people who are really doing Mac development. To that end, here are some ideas for ways that Mac developers could become a part of the conference and thus have another venue for getting together in addition to WWDC.

Tutorials: Oh goodness, where to start with tutorials. There's so much knowledge here that could be shared: Objective-C, UI development with Cocoa, and Xcode are all great candidates for half-day tutorials. This is one of the areas where I think there could be some fantastic work done. There's a lot of Mac users who come to OOPSLA, so I would think that some Mac tutorials would go over quite well.

Practitioner reports: The lessons learned in cross-platform development, adding garbage collection to your Cocoa app (what you learned, what improvements you expected, what improvement were actually made, ... ), converting your app from Carbon to Cocoa.

Panels: Development environment shoot-out (Visual Studio vs eclipse vs Xcode vs ... ), choosing your development platform of choice, why indie development for Mac is so strong.

Workshops: How about a Mac developer workshop?

Don't get me wrong, I love WWDC. But WWDC is about a different goal. WWDC is about us as Mac developers learning from Apple. Is is less expressly about learning from each other.

If you're interested in submitting something for OOPSLA and want someone to bounce ideas off of, feel free to ping me. I'd love to see more Mac content here, so if you have an idea but aren't sure how to best fit it into OOPSLA, I'm sure we can come up with something.