Geez, we blinked for a second and suddenly the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference is almost upon us. And despite our shocked realization that May 11th is a scant seven weeks away (seems like it was six months away only, er, four months ago), for our money it can't arrive soon enough. Not, mind you, because we at AtAT are developers, because we're not-- our attention spans are so atrophied by years of mindless television that anything more complex than "Hello World" is slightly beyond our grasp. No, we're interested because it's the one time Apple is going to have to sit down and tell the world just exactly what its operating system strategy is going to be. And we admit to being slightly perplexed by Apple's incredible underplaying of Rhapsody for a long time now.

Rhapsody hasn't even been mentioned in the last two MacWorld Expo keynotes, the Seybold keynote, the November 10th "big deal," or any other high-profile Apple event that we can remember. We find it particularly interesting that as far as we heard, it was barely even mentioned in the Seybold address, since it's supposed to be an operating system both for servers and for power-users-- and few users need more power than the graphics folks. That's why we're looking forward to the WWDC, which, according to thessaSOURCE, Jobs claims will have a heavy Rhapsody focus.

We are still hoping that Apple has something very cool waiting in the wings-- namely, a version of the Mac OS that incorporates many of Rhapsody's most important user features and is also capable of running "Yellow Box" Rhapsody applications. It would be a smart move if Apple can pull it off technically. Users running the latest Mac OS could get preemptive multitasking and protected memory, run all their current applications natively, and still run new "Yellow" applications. Developers would use Rhapsody as their programming environment, which lets them deploy for Mac OS, Rhapsody, and Windows all at once. Could be neat. Here's hoping we find out in seven weeks.

Evidence of developer confusion about just what's up with Rhapsody is perhaps best illustrated by John Carmack's .plan file, which has been posted at StepWise. Carmack, you may know, is the programming guru over at id Software, the company who brought you Doom and Quake. Carmack has long been a vocal supporter of NeXTStep, the operating system on which Rhapsody is based, and in fact he had personally committed to doing a port of Quake 2 to Rhapsody all by himself. Now, though, that promise looks like it may be abandoned.

Carmack announced yesterday that he has shut down the last of the NeXT systems at id, and they're using Windows systems exclusively now. Says he, "I had high hopes for Rhapsody, but even on a top of the line PPC, it felt painfully sluggish compared to the NT workstations." (Of course, the only version out there is the first developer release, and we'd certainly hope that speed will increase both in the second developer release and the first customer release.) In addition, "Apple doesn't have their 3D act together at all," he says, referring to Apple's lack of support for the industry standard OpenGL 3D programming interface, of which he is a huge advocate.

While he says he "hasn't given up on Rhapsody yet," the confusion surrounding Rhapsody's targeting has put a serious damper on his planned support. One of the most interesting quotes is that Apple was "so incredibly cautious about targeting Rhapsody for consumer apps at the expense of Mac OS that I doubted their resolve." We've been hearing the same thing from a lot of AtAT viewers who also happen to be developers. If Apple is truly counting on Rhapsody as the basis for its operating system future, they had better clear up this confusion once and for all or it'll starve to death on a dearth of applications. Let's hope seven weeks isn't too late.

We can't say we're particularly surprised, but we still think it's pretty odd that copycat pie attacks are now being launched against software mogul Bill Gates. You recall, of course, the original incident from early last month, in which Bill was hit with several cream cakes by an anarchist group in Brussels as he entered a building to meet with the Prime Minister of Flanders. Now Wired reports that a group in the Phillipines planned to do the same, as Bill arrived to meet with politicians and "technology conglomerates."

The protesters were members of the Phillippines Greens group, who demanded that Microsoft "submit to genuine compulsory licensing of software wherein local businesses are granted licenses to copy foreign-made software and sell them on the local market at lower prices." Which is equivalent to, say, demanding that Apple let us dupe off our Mac OS 8 CD-ROM and sell the copies for $30 a pop. (Where do people get these ideas?) Alas, the protesters' plans were foiled as Bill managed to avoid them entirely, and so they had to be satisfied with a "pieing in effigy;" they hurled their baked goods at a man wearing a Gates mask, which we've got to imagine isn't quite the same experience.

By the way, we recently mentioned that Bill Gates was the second richest man on the planet, coming in behind the Sultan of Brunei. As it turns out, Bill's wealth surpassed the Sultan's sometime over the last couple of months, and Bill is now indeed the wealthiest human being in existence. We at AtAT would probably feel okay about taking a few pies in the face in exchange for being richer than a Sultan, but that's just our opinion.