Even though Rhapsody's still in its first developer release, it's creating a bit of a stir with its cross-platform development capabilities. One of the most intriguing features of the Rhapsody development environment is its reported ability to recompile a single application codebase for deployment on other non-Rhapsody platforms. These "Yellow Box" applications can then run on any platform that has a Yellow Box implementation, which currently includes Windows NT and may include the Mac OS, Solaris, and other operating systems.

Sounds great, but we were skeptical. Enter Mac OS Rumors, who report on a Rhapsody application being recompiled for NT. Omni Development ported their Omniweb browser to NT in a day via the Yellow Box. Omniweb is a full-fledged major application, not just some tiny "Hello World" program, and porting it to NT in a day on a lark is a pretty incredible feat-- imagine porting, say, Netscape from Windows to the Mac in a day; that's a similar comparison. According to the guy at Omni, though they haven't fully tested the ported application, as far as they can tell, "everything just works." (There's even a screenshot link at the Rumors site.)

Now, we at AtAT aren't software developers, per se-- but if we were, and we had an option to write software on Rhapsody and then, with a tiny bit of effort, compile and ship that software for Rhapsody PPC, Rhapsody Intel, Windows 95, Windows NT, probably the Mac OS, and possibly Solaris, we'd jump at the chance. Heck, who wouldn't?

With no real new products to roll out in three weeks (the NC's are no longer expected to make an appearance, by most accounts), what exactly will Steve Jobs talk about in his MacWorld Expo keynote address? That's the question put forth in an article by Computer Retail Week. They expect Jobs to stick to Apple's plan for the future-- but we hope there's more than that, because man are we getting tired of these "Apple's New Focus" speeches.

So here's our guess: Jobs will introduce the PowerExpress machines and will make a big deal about them being the first machines truly targeted at content creators. He may introduce new product-oriented "Think Different" ads, since the PowerExpress machines should demonstrably outpace Pentium II systems. He will probably avoid even mentioning the touchy CEO issue (just as, in August, he avoided mentioning the touchy clone issue). Now that Rhapsody DR has shipped, he may spend some time talking about that. And there will be no end of reaffirmations that Apple and its users are "special." (We know, already. Now can we please have a sub-$1000 Mac?)

Perhaps most disturbing in the article is hearing that Apple's fourth-quarter sales are "falling short of its performance in previous years." Wasn't the big reason for Apple's poor performance last year said to be "Santa didn't come [last] Christmas?" If sales are even worse this year, is there any hope of a return to profitability before fall?

Believe it or not, we at AtAT try to be charitable during the holidays. (Stop laughing.) But everytime Microsoft starts trying to persuade the K-12 education market to replace their Macs with Windows 95 systems, we have to say there's little we find more immoral.

Consider, for instance, this Microsoft page expressly written to lure grade schools and high schools to ditch their Macs and replace them with Windows 95 machines. This page is packed with half-truths, judgment calls, and outright deception all meant to get schools to spend their money on new computer systems. (Selling Windows 95 as better than Macintosh by touting its Plug-and-Play feature is like selling a Yugo as better than a Saturn because a Yugo occasionally starts.)

Now why do we find this so hateful? Because, as we've mentioned in the past, the administrators who make the decisions to buy a school's computers are not the people who have to use and support those machines. The kids suffer by using systems that work less often and make them focus on the tool instead of the task at hand (namely, to learn). The teachers suffer because they're expected to be system administrators on top of being teachers, and they often lack any kind of training in the field-- Macs are easy enough to manage even for an overworked and undertrained fifth-grade teacher, but stick that teacher in a lab full of broken Windows 95 machines, and everyone's got a problem. Microsoft's only in it for the money. Period. Because if they cared about the kids in the schools, they'd tell them to keep their Macs-- or they'd ship an OS that actually works.