Who else out there totally forgot that Apple's still looking for a new CEO? As strange as it sounds, we at AtAT would swear on a stack of Macintosh Bibles that that particular little plot twist had almost completely slipped our minds. Luckily, Bloomberg News saw fit to remind us by reporting that Apple is "close" to hiring a new point man.

According to the article, Apple's narrowed the candidates down to four or five unnamed front runners, all of whom are currently being grilled by interim CEO Steve Jobs. ("Say you find yourself entirely unable to compete with your clone companies in price/performance. What do you do?") John Thompson of Apple's recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles says that while many potential candidates were frightened off by the idea of having to work with Steve Jobs, others are "encouraged" by the prospect. Which implies, of course, that the candidates on Apple's current list either don't know Steve, or are gluttons for punishment. Either way, Apple is expected to name a new top dog in the next 30 to 45 days.

Now, while we normally trust the Bloomberg News implicitly, we have to think that somebody somewhere is exaggerating a wee bit. Four or five candidates? We're hard-pressed to imagine anyone qualified wanting the job, let alone four or five people-- last year, Apple was almost reduced to asking random people in the diner on the corner if they'd like to run a multibillion-dollar company. (And when most of those random lunchers heard that the company was Apple and they'd have to work under the watchful eye of Steve Jobs, they made a rude gesture and returned to their Reubens and coffee.) Could this sudden bumper crop of candidates be the result of last quarter's surprise profit? Stay tuned.

Good news for Apple, and good news for the rest of us, too: a collection of computer technology companies that reads like a Who's Who of High Tech That Isn't Owned by Microsoft announced today that ISO, the international Organization for Standardization (yes, we know the acronym doesn't work; it's an ISO thing, you wouldn't understand) has accepted their proposal to make the QuickTime file format the basis for the development of a universal multimedia format, to be defined in the MPEG-4 specification. Apple, IBM, SGI, Sun, Netscape, and Oracle spill the warm fuzzies in a press release.

MPEG-4 is the next digital video standard currently being developed by the Moving Pictures Experts Group, whose current standard, MPEG-2, is used on DVD's and for digital video broadcasting. The decision to use QuickTime's file format as MPEG-4's basis is due in part to the already-broad acceptance of Apple's multimedia technology, which it claims is installed on over 50 million personal computers right now. Since so much existing and developing multimedia software is based on QuickTime, all of that software should be pretty easily converted over to the MPEG-4 standard, whatever it turns out to be. All in all, this is pretty huge news for Apple.

So, worst-case scenario: Apple's marketshare continues to dwindle, sales fall through the floor, Apple jettisons its hardware business, reorganizes, and re-emerges as QuickTime, Inc. The newly-reborn company provides top-notch, industry-standard, cross-platform multimedia software. And all 100 employees live happily ever after. ;-)

Mac OS Rumors has more on the fate of Newton, Apple's scrappy little handheld operating system that sits constantly with the sword of Damocles hanging over its head. According to their sources, that OS is indeed getting skewered and tossed out in favor of "Allegro Lite," a version of the Mac OS that has been run through a miniaturizing ray.

Note, however, that this description of Allegro Lite differs from what other sources, such as MacWEEK, have been calling Allegro Lite: instead of a "thin-client" version of the Mac OS for handhelds, MacWEEK claims that Allegro Lite is Apple's repackaging of Allegro with fewer features, so that it can ship on time this summer. Sounds like somebody somewhere got their wires crossed, though we won't know which rumor is correct until Allegro Lite finally ships, whether it be as a feature-reduced Mac OS 8.2, or the new OS for Apple's next-generation handhelds.

While the Macifying of Newton is being reported from a Rumors site, it does fit in pretty well with the Mac OS-centric world view we've seen from Apple for the past six months; all that talk about the Mac OS being the most important asset at Apple and downplaying both Rhapsody and Newton makes this Allegro Lite scenario seem pretty feasible. We've also seen a precedent for Apple adopting Microsoft's strategies, both with technical support pricing, and with their "dual-OS" strategy, so coming out with Allegro Lite as a sort of "Mac OS CE" isn't all that far-fetched. Personally, we'll be sad if the Newton goes the way of the dodo; it's truly the best and most elegant of the PDA operating systems.