It's out! Or, at least, it was out. We speak of Mac OS 8.6, that delectable system update commonly known as Veronica, done for a week but kept under wraps for an "opportune" unveiling moment. What moment could be more opportune than next week's Worldwide Developers Conference? So here we were, all ready to start downloading the free updater once it surfaced on Apple's servers on Monday, when suddenly MacCentral reported this afternoon that Mac OS 8.6 had unexpectedly dropped in unannounced-- it was available via anonymous download from Apple's FTP servers earlier today. Seems like some eager young server admin jumped the gun.

Alas, by the time we found out and tried the supplied URL, anonymous access had been removed-- apparently Apple noticed that people were downloading software that, for all extents and purposes, didn't actually exist yet and pulled the plug. Or was it just an overloaded server? Because when we tried again a few hours later, we got a little bit further; anonymous access was granted, but all that was in the Mac OS 8.6 folder was another folder called "Multiple Parts." And inside that? Nothing at all. So either Mac OS 8.6 is the tiniest system update ever to come out of Apple's labs ("Fully downloads in less than one second!"), or most of us really are going to have to wait until the software's big introduction on Monday before we actually get our grubby little mitts on it.

But that's okay with us-- we're always a little paranoid when it comes to installing system upgrades, anyway. Most of the time we'll even wait a few days and keep one eye tuned to MacFixit to see if there are any big issues that could cause us grief. So in the meantime, we'll just be backing up our whole system and checking our hard disks for lurking problems so we'll be ready to go once Mac OS 8.6 comes streaming across the 'net and onto our desktop. You may want to follow our lead, and also to read MacNN's Mac OS 8.6 notes about what's different and what conflicts have already been discovered. After all, it never pays to be careless about these things.

We admit it-- we miss the EvangeList. There was a real sense of community to be derived from being a member of an electronic mailing list consisting of tens of thousands of like-minded Mac fanatics. Sure, the EvangeList was probably best known for its ability to unleash the full torrent of hundreds of flaming e-missives upon any journalists who dared reveal their anti-Mac bias and ignorance, but there was a lot more posted than just calls to arms. We miss the announcements of new Mac web sites, the requests for Mac-based solutions to a multitude of problems, the Mac-centric job opportunities, the EvangeList-only special offers on new Mac products-- all the stuff that really made the EvangeList so much more than just a massively parallel pro-Macintosh flamethrower. (Not that it couldn't dish some serious flamage when the occasion presented itself.)

So we always felt it was a little strange that Apple's stated reason for shutting down the EvangeList was that there's now so much less anti-Mac bias in the press these days-- as if that obviates the usefulness of a mailing list of thousands of community-minded Mac users. But it's that very community-mindedness that might resurrect the EvangeList, albeit in a slightly different (and non-Apple-sponsored) form. For instance, there's the EvangeListas.com web site and mailing list coming online shortly, being headed up by Steven Bobker, the former Editor-in-Chief of the late lamented MacUser magazine. Sign up now and avoid the rush.

There's also another Mac-oriented news list coming together, although it's a little more removed from the original EvangeList; still, you might want to check out the new "apple-news" list and see if it's what you're looking for. See? Nothing has to go away forever. As long as there are Mac users interested in hearing from like-minded citizens, there will be forums for this sort of information.

Remember back when Apple first started shopping around for outside operating system technology to replace the jumbled mess of unreleasable code known as Copland? Before Steve Jobs' NeXT was even a blip on Apple's radar screen, everyone thought the shoe-in would be Be. The BeOS was a fledgling effort, to be sure (at the time it couldn't even print), but it ran on PowerPC-based Macintosh hardware, was fully modern and multithreaded from the ground up, and had been designed as an operating system that could handle the demands of working with digital media, which seemed to mesh quite well with the needs of Apple's core professional markets. Several publications had gone so far as to print that Apple's purchasing of the BeOS as the foundation of the next-generation Mac OS was as good as done-- leading to some embarrassing "Dewey Defeats Truman" moments when Jobs and his Amazing Technicolor Reality Distortion Field managed to persuade Apple that buying NeXT for $400 million was a better deal. (In our opinion, that turned out to be true, if for no other reason than it got Jobs back into Apple and ready to turn things around, but at the time many considered it a strange choice.)

Since then, you may not have heard a whole lot from Be, but they're still busy little workers, buzzing hither and thither and continuing to craft their new operating system. One of the reasons we don't hear so much about them on the Mac side of the fence is because the latest releases don't run on the latest Power Macs; Apple refuses to provide Be with the G3 specs necessary to get the OS running on the new hardware. So Be has turned its attention to the Intel world, and AtAT was present at the Be Developers Conference a couple of years ago when the BeOS was first revealed to run on Pentium hardware. (That was also the moment at which we started to lose interest in the whole thing.) In fact, Intel has stuck a whole lot of cash into Be-- about a 10% stake-- probably in hopes of building up some real honest-to-goodness operating system competition for Microsoft.

That Intel money was apparently enough to get Be far enough along to file for an IPO-- which is just what they're doing, according to AAPL Investors. A Bloomberg report states that Be hopes to raise about $57 million from going public, even though the company warns that they "have only one product that may never gain broad market acceptance." That's not stopping them, though, and we just have to admire any company willing to take on the Redmond Giant, so we wish them the best of luck with their IPO and getting the BeOS into the public eye. Meanwhile, we Mac users still have a long while to wait before we really get to enjoy the OS fruits of the NeXT buyout in the form of Mac OS X, due (hopefully) some time before we all die...