Curiously enough, despite Steve Jobs' manic glee with his pet project known to us mere mortals as the "Think Different" ad campaign, the man who came up with the slogan itself has apparently been laid off. MacInsider has the exclusive, including Sam Wood's departure letter to his colleagues.

We can only assume that Steve feels the campaign is his and his alone. Reports of his involvement in the campaign's progress are voluminous. For one, we've heard that the reason there were two showings of the same commercial during the Toy Story ABC broadcast (instead of the expected two separate ads) was due to Steve pulling the second ad at the last minute, because he wasn't entirely happy with it. Also, the voiceover is done by Richard Dreyfuss, but Mac the Knife and others have reported that the original cut had the voice of Steve himself. And the very first time the phrase "Think Different" appeared to the public was during Steve's keynote at the MacWorld Expo last August. Perhaps in the past couple of months, he's assimilated it entirely from its original source. We're sorry to hear of another long-standing Apple employee losing his job.

One last thing-- we had always assumed that the arguable ungrammaticality of Apple's new catch phrase was an intentional irony and a marketing hook, but after reading Wood's farewell letter (in which he urges his coworkers to "most important, keep the dream alive"), we're starting to think it was just an adjective-instead-of-adverb mistake after all. Fancy that.

Several months ago, we at AtAT downloaded a keen little application called Cocoa Player, that allowed us to view projects assembled with Cocoa, an Apple multimedia authoring environment for kids. (Think "Macromedia Director for Little'uns.") After playing with the winning entries in Apple's "Win an eMate" contest, including a full-fledged multi-part game put together by a grade-school girl, we were suitably impressed. Alas, with Apple needing to "refocus its energies on its core assets," it looked like Cocoa would become one of those way-cool technologies that would fall by the wayside.

But wait! Larry Tesler (formerly Apple's chief scientist) and a few other ex-Apple researchers have launched Stagecast, a company that struck a deal with Apple that allows them to continue Cocoa's development and market it commercially. Read about it here. They are extending Cocoa's current capabilities and reworking it in Java, allowing it to run cross-platform. It's expected to ship in early 1998.

Kids today get all the best toys!

We reported yesterday on the recent MacOS Rumors server outage, stating our conspiracy theory that they had been "silenced" for their breaking coverage of the proposed Oracle-Apple merger. Well, apparently the big guys have gotten to the sites' administrators, because they've publicly announced on MacInsider that the outage is the result of "disagreements" between the Rumors staff and their ISP. They claim that Mac OS Rumors will be back up starting Thursday. Only time will tell. In the meantime, be wary of strangers and keep watching the skies.

And that advice goes triple for thessaSOURCE, who posted their own coverage of the Jobs/Ellison merger proposal today. There's a lot of juicy info there about the probable future of the hardware and software departments, should the merger go through sometime after Larry and Steve make the formal proposal on October 30th. You should go check it out-- if you dare. And when you're done, flush your cache, reformat your hard drive, and then burn it just to be sure.

Here's hoping that thessaSOURCE doesn't develop its own "server troubles" in the night...