Man, remember when pre-Expo speculation leaned toward stuff like iMac screen size, FireWire in iBooks, and what clock speeds various Apple products would increase to when Steve broke the good news? And these days we're all going nuts over the possibility of a new mouse. Well, we admit, it's at least been a nice change of pace for those of us who like to dish the dirt-- sort of like "blah blah blah new iMac blah blah Apple retail stores blah blah blah Apple handheld chuckle snort blah have you heard how Apple's new mouse is optical, wireless, and has no buttons?"

Anyway, those dumpster-diving fiends over at AppleInsider have definitely been the biggest source of juice on Apple's mysterious new input device, and they're continuing their trend with their latest update: more details on the device's rumored support of "multiple button actions." It seems that documentation in recent developmental versions of Mac OS X refer to a couple of new mouse-action API calls: TipSwitch and BarrelSwitch. The former reportedly handles what would be considered a standard "click" of the new mouse (rumored to involve tipping the device forward), while the latter deals with what happens when the user squeezes the sides of the thing. So for those of you who have been clamoring for years for Apple to ship a two-button mouse, you may soon get your wish-- sort of. It's a no-button mouse, after all, but it seems to handle separate events analogous to a left-click and right-click.

Better still, AppleInsider claims that Darwin, the open-source kernel that forms the heart of Mac OS X, actually supports up to 32 mouse buttons in its mouse driver, thus opening the door for extremely sophisticated input actions. So depending on just how Apple builds this new mouse, it sounds like tilting it forward could be a standard click, squeezing it could be a control-click, tilting and squeezing could be a command-click, squeezing while shaking it up and down could eject all removable media, smashing it repeatedly against the wall could invoke Mac OS Help, and clicking two of these mice together while saying "there's no place like home" could load the State of Kansas web page in your browser. Now that's progress.

However, we wouldn't get our hopes up for an Apple mouse that could actually register 32 separate kinds of "clicks." Our own unimpeachable sources reveal that one prototype "UltraInput" mouse in Apple's test lab was configured to bind dozens of Quake commands to complex squeezes, nudges, and finger placements, thus enabling a trained test subject to play the game entirely with a single mouse and no keyboard. Unfortunately, after ten minutes of frenzied deathmatch play, the experiment was unexpectedly interrupted when the subject's carpal tunnel exploded. Back to the drawing board...

Can't make it to New York in a couple weeks? Or maybe you're planning to attend the big shindig, but you couldn't afford a couple hundred bucks for a conference pass, so you're limited to the show floor. Or heck, maybe you live right in Midtown Manhattan but you can't take time off work to attend. For whatever reason, you're bumming because you're going to have to miss Uncle Steve's keynote address, an event unparalleled in religious significance for the devoted Mac user. There is no greater glory than to bask in his live, unfiltered Reality Distortion Field, absorbing those mysterious life-affirming rays. All is Steve, Steve is all, Steve is the Walrus, goo goo g'joob. Wait... What were we just talking about, again?

Oh, missing the keynote. Right. Well, if you can't be there in meatspace, don't beat yourself up about it-- you can always tune in to the simulcast. Yes, Virginia, according to MacCentral, there is a webcast planned. Most of you would never have doubted this for a second, since Apple pretty much always webcasts the domestic Expo Stevenotes, but the more pessimistic among you may have been expecting to be shafted once again, and with good reason: the Tokyo Expo Stevenote was not webcast, despite its strategic importance as the introduction of Pismo. And even this year's WWDC keynote was kept offline, much to the chagrin of Apple-watchers the world over, despite the fact that the show has traditionally been webcast in the past. Luckily, this web-shyness phase appears to be over, so in less than two weeks the 'net will be suffused with live Steveness.

So if you can't see Steve up close and in person, fret not; just make sure you're near a QuickTime Player with a decent connection on the morning of the 19th, and you'll be able to watch the proceedings-- a blurry, smeary, pixellated version of the proceedings, sure, but hey, it's better than nothing. At least, we hope it'll be better than nothing, though at this point we're going entirely by what MacCentral says. Apple still hasn't posted any info on the alleged webcast, so there's still a slim chance that Apple has lost its collective mind and has chosen not to share His Steveness with the rest of the 'net. It's not likely, though, so we'd relax if we were you.

You know, we got so wrapped up in discussing Mac the Knife's fate yesterday, we never got around to talking about what's actually in the latest NMR Report. NMR, of course, stands for "Naked Mole Rat," the current incarnation of the Blade formerly known as Mac-- and while we still hear the occasional claim that the Rat is not the One True Knife, we're now pretty secure in our feeling that the two are one and the same. And anyway, what if he is an imposter? In that case, the Rat does the Knife just as well as the Knife himself, so from a Turing Test sort of standpoint, what difference does it make?

But we digress. (Again.) What we really wanted to call to your attention is the Rat's speculation that Apple is not only working on multiprocessor G4 Macs, such as the Mystic box we've all been waiting for since last year, but also a far stranger beast. Rumor has it that Apple's mad genius lab gnomes are "seeking creative new avenues" in a zany attempt to build a multiprocessor G3 system, in part because the supply of G4 chips has been mighty sketchy in the past. Now, those of you who know a little about the G3 architecture may be making a noise like Scooby Doo when his sandwich gets up and walks away; the conventional wisdom has always told us that the G3 just isn't built for multiprocessing, consarn it, which is why there hasn't been a multiprocessor Mac since Apple discontinued the 604-based Power Mac 9500 line. (There's also that little issue about the Mac OS not supporting multiprocessing at a symmetric level, but bore us not with your petty details.)

But something about this rumor rang a teensy little bell in the back of our collective cranium. After a bit of rooting around through the Reruns, we managed to dig up an old episode from March of '98 which described a quad-G3 system that was actually sold for $4495. As it turns out, the system in question reportedly was able to get the four G3s all working together by running the Amiga operating system, which somehow found a way to do what the Mac OS can't. Or, should we say, can't so far? Could it be that Apple's learned by example and found a way to do what AmigaOS 3.1 reportedly could do over two years ago? Personally, we doubt it, but it's a fun thought experiment to kill time while we wait for that dual-G4 to see the light of day.