Are you the type of ungrateful offspring that perennially forgets Mother's Day? Shame on you! That poor, courageous woman raised you, fed you, cleaned up unspeakable messes for you, and you can't even remember to send her a card once a year? We are ashamed-- nay, repulsed-- by your insensitivity. You know what this means, don't you? This year, you're going to have to do something extra special to atone for the sins of the past. You're too far gone for flowers or candy to do the trick-- the only Mother's Day gift that truly says "I've been a horrible tick in the past but now I'm a responsible, thoughtful, conscientious son or daughter who really loves you" comes in five flavors from Apple.

That's right, Apple's continuing in the vein of last March's St. Patrick's Day Lime iMac special by offering a limited-time Mother's Day price on an iMac-and-printer bundle. For $1379 you can get dear ol' mum a 333 MHz iMac in her favorite flavor, bundled together with an Epson Stylus Color 740 printer. (Thank heavens Apple didn't fall prey to "pink razor syndrome" and do something incredibly lame like limit the offer to Strawberry.) That price reflects a savings of $70 off the normal Apple Store price, which you can sock away for some nice flowers next year, now that you've turned over a new leaf.

Now, some of you are thinking to yourselves, "Could I take advantage of this offer to buy the system for myself, instead of for my mother?" Well, technically, yeah, we assume so-- we doubt Apple requires that you provide a DNA sample from your mom to prove that the iMac's end-user is maternally enabled. But really-- thinking only of yourself instead of the dear, sweet woman who sacrificed so much for you? Such selfishness... Maybe you should get her a full-fledged G3 instead.

It's no secret that we think Apple's doing a pretty bang-up job of riding the Star Wars: Episode I coattails of hype. With over ten million downloads of the QuickTime-only trailer, including over a million downloads of the enhanced QuickTime 4 version, all of this swelling expectation and impatience for Episode I is really raising Apple's visibility on the Internet. In particular, we have no doubt that lots and lots of people, PC users included, are downloading and installing QuickTime just to watch the trailers and commercials. Thank goodness for exclusive distribution rights...

Once QuickTime 4 surfaced in its current "preview" incarnation, though, we expected Apple to use the whole Star Wars hypefest to promote it hard. To a certain extent, they made some effort; the trailer and the new commercials are available in separate QuickTime 4-only versions that feature better sound and video. Still, the Big Feature™ of QuickTime 4 isn't crisper video and stereo sound in a smaller file, though that's nice and all. The Big Feature™ is streaming video, which finally makes QuickTime a viable competitor to other live streaming video technologies from Microsoft and Real Networks. So we were a little surprised that Apple didn't showcase QuickTime Streaming with some of the new Episode I stuff.

Of course, that was before we noticed the new Phantom Menace music video posted to Apple's web site. The clip, which features music by the ever-lovin' John Williams played over yet more scenes from the film (we're starting to feel like we've already seen the whole movie-- just not played in the right order), is streamed as video-on-demand from Apple's servers, meaning it's QuickTime 4-only. It's a nice demonstration of QuickTime Streaming's capabilities, but we'd really like them to showcase a live feed. Perhaps live video of the poor souls camped out on the street for tickets already?

Speaking of science fiction movies (chalk up another kick-ass segue for the AtAT team! Woo-hoo!), ever since Scotty tried to control an original Mac by speaking into its mouse in 1986's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, voice interaction with Macs has been a Holy Grail for some of the more forward-thinking users out there. Apple's had PlainTalk software that allows the control of certain system functions ever since the AV Quadras and the first Power Macs, but dictation software has lagged severely on the Mac side of the fence compared to what's available for Windows. Rumors have been circulating for many, many moons now that Apple's about to change that.

According to Apple Insider, no one's entirely sure why Apple's efforts to build a next-generation speech technology hasn't yet borne fruit, but the latest rumor seems to be that Apple's not only working with mysterious outside parties, but also that they are considering an outright buyout of one of those companies-- possibly General Magic. Meanwhile, IBM is said to be porting their own "ViaVoice" dictation software to the Mac platform, driven by the iMac's sales success. There's no word on when it'll surface, but when it does, it'll be nice to have a natural-speech dictation solution that only costs about $50.

Personally, we're a little skeptical that voice dictation will ever really replace keyboard or stylus input. Specifically, we're thinking about offices full of cubicled employees, all speaking at once trying to get their work done. And what about entering notes while speaking to someone on the phone? That's not to say that more dictation software wouldn't be very welcome in the controlled environment of the AtAT studios, but as a companion to the keyboard, and not as its replacement. Besides, we've been so spoiled by the freedom of text editing capabilities, non-linear input is the order of the day; having to write by dictating a linear stream of sentences, well, it just sounds primitive as all get-out. ;-)