Time and again, important techniques and technologies languish inside an obscure priesthood of Believers. Unwilling to bend, they wait for the world to catch up while they silently snicker at the troglodytes who walk among them.

During popularization — if ever attained — inevitably the “purity” of the object of affection is compromised. Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch argues this dirty hybridization is isn’t just inevitable, it’s integral. All hail the mash-up.

In the wild-west interface design era of early GUI applications, Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines provided a stable foundation for Mac developers to build upon.

Well-reasoned and articulate, the HIG codified what it meant for software to be “Mac-like”. So, today, it’s with considerable consternation that developers watch Apple break and ignore its own guidelines.

John Gruber argues that Apple has not ditched consistency. Instead, they’ve abandoned uniformity, perhaps with good reason.

With 40 beers on tap and open till 2 am, Jak’s Tap was a big hit last year. A great place to hang out and mingle with your fellow developers.

This year we’ll be in the party room, with a private bar and free pool table.

It was one hell of a 0.1 point-release. With NetNewsWire 2.1, Brent Simmons integrated his leading desktop feed-reader with a leading web feed-reading service.

Desktop apps are hybridizing with web sites and web services, and Brent’s on the front lines. He’ll share his hard-won experiences and insights concerning synchronizing a desktop experience with a web experience.

Lua is a lightweight language that’s growing in popularity with both the game crowd (Blizzard’s World of Warcraft) and the app crowd (Meetro, Adobe’s Lightroom). Key to Lua’s story is its support for extensible semantics: hooks which allow you to extend Lua in unconventional ways.

Gus Mueller is also a fan of this embeddable language, and recently added Lua support to his popular VoodooPad desktop wiki app. Gus provides a short introduction to the language and walks through what it takes to embed it into an Objective-C application.

Dual-core processors are commonplace. Four-cores are readily available. Sure as dawn, more-cores are on the way. Stretching to take better advantage of available concurrency, most developers are reaching towards the conventional solution: threads.

Unfortunately, threads provide little more than raw concurrency. Deciding what to thread, avoiding race conditions and protecting shared state against corrupting concurrent update is all laid at your feet.

The Actor concurrency model provides a simple extension to message-passing call-semantics already common in object-oriented languages. The model alleviates many of the problems with using raw threads. Steve Dekorte explores the Actor model, based on his experiences creating Io, a small programming language that supports Actors directly.

Effective version control is integral to quality software development. As the scourge of CVS grows weaker by the day, Subversion takes its rightful place on the throne of the open-source version control program of choice.

Brian W. Fitzpatrick has been working on Subversion since its inception as a replacement for CVS, and is one of the main authors of cvs2svn. Fitz discusses what he foresees (and would like to see) in both the near-term and far-flung future of version control.

The previously influential blogger and host of last year’s Evening at Adler hosts a panel discussion. Topics include Apple quality control, the continuing saga of DRM, desktop Linux for real for sure this time, the politics of crash reporting, blogger subpoena wind-down and the Problem of the Faithful.

C4 officially concludes Saturday night with a dinner bash at Gino’s East, serving authentic Chicago-style pizza, pasta and salad.

If you haven’t had enough fun yet, consider joining us on the optional Sunday outing to Adler Planetarium.