Hallelujah, the post-Expo rumors drought finally appears to be over! We never thought we'd see the day, but we're looking at a hat trick, here: the Big Three of the online Mac rumor mill all posted updates on Monday. AppleInsider (who has been suspiciously silent ever since its Expo Eve prediction of iMacs sporting DVD/CD-RW combo drives fell flat) has returned from the dead, bearing details about an upcoming version of Macromedia Director and its 3D component that is apparently named after a cheesy Disney movie. The Naked Mole Rat has evidently rediscovered the joys of speed over barbiturates, because he's just posted his fourth update in sixteen days-- a pace clearly far in excess of his usual tendencies. And Mac OS Rumors continues its recent spate of alarmingly frequent dirt-dishing with a Monday report on Mac OS X-native applications, a boatload of insanely great stuff slated for this summer's Macworld Expo, and an interesting twist on the Apple retail store scenario.

Given this embarrassment of riches, we're homing right in on the dirt that grabbed our attention and yanked it the hardest-- namely, Apple's rumored plans to turn its brick-and-mortar Apple stores into Internet cafés, only without the hourly charges, the typical crappy Wintel terminals, or, um, the café. Word has it that Apple's latest plan is to outfit each boutique with a high-speed 'net connection and a slew of Macs expressly for customer use. If this indeed comes to pass, someday you'll be able to wander into your local Apple store, plunk yourself down in front of a Mac, fire up a web browser, and surf to your heart's content. And you won't just be limited to 'net access; "gaming, browsing the Internet, even using the computers for work are all acceptable." All that's missing is the latté.

But don't order yet, because there's more; word has it that customers will be able to sign up for an Apple boutique user account that will allow them to log in at any Mac in any Apple store anywhere and get immediate access to their own "applications, files, and system settings seamlessly from a server at Apple." And what do you want to bet that account will really just be an iTools account, whose architecture is being extended via Mac OS X and Apple's grand scheme for retail domination?

We admit, we're a little skeptical that Apple would offer such a nifty service for free, but in a way, it really does fit in with other recent developments in Apple's Internet strategy. Who else gives its customers free IMAP-based email accounts, free storage on an Internet virtual disk, and free web-page serving-- all without ads? Why not an "iRetail" component of iTools that lets customers borrow a Mac for an hour (with integrated iDisk access and stored Preferences) in any Apple retail location? It's a great service for existing customers (just like iTools is already), but it's also a huge draw for new customers. If Random Consumer Guy can walk in off the street, sign up for an iTools account, and log in for free 'net access and a round of Quake 3 Arena, the staff is sure to inform him that any saved games or downloaded files stored on his iDisk will be instantly available from any Mac he might eventually purchase. Now that's incentive to buy. (And if they throw in a free double mochaccino, sales can only get better.)

So we can't say for sure exactly what changes the Naked Mole Rat has made to his daily pharmaceutical intake over the course of this past month (less cough syrup, more benzene?), but whatever he's doing differently, it's working for him. Not only has he posted four updates in sixteen days (a frequency 40% better than even when his previous incarnation tapped the keys for the long-lamented dead tree edition of MacWEEK), but this latest account even serves up the juice on the down and dirty world of intraoffice Apple politics. High frequency and high drama? It's like Christmas in July! (Only in March.)

Scholars of Jobsian History are only too familiar with the way in which Apple's once and present king instigated what amounted to an Apple civil war. On the one side was the Apple II team, developing and supporting the company's flagship architecture that had paid the bills for the past seven years; on the other stood the Macintosh team, a band of Jobs-styled pirates that flew the Jolly Roger and looked to take Apple into its next era of greatness. (See the flawless historical document Pirates of Silicon Valley for more on this bitter schism.) Now, even if you're only up on your recent Apple history, you may notice that if you take another look at the above description and replace the words "Apple II" with "Mac OS 9" and "Macintosh" with "Mac OS X" (and the number seven with seventeen), you've got a pretty accurate portrayal of the tension over at One Infinite Loop. We don't know what it is about Steve that inspires class war wherever he goes, but such is life.

Yes, ever since Steve got Gil Amelio bounced out on his butt, seized control of the company he cofounded, and placed his trusted NeXT comrades in positions of power, we've heard the occasional story of NeXT-vs.-"Classic" Apple friction burning away in Cupertino. While it never seemed to get as out of hand as the Apple II-vs.-Macintosh rivalry lo these many years ago, there was reportedly a definite bipartisan split that may have been to Apple's detriment. But according to the Rat, this latest round of us-versus-them may be winding to a close, now that Mac OS X has shipped and stands poised to become the Macintosh operating system. With the completion of the 10.0 version, the Rat reports that the 9 and X teams are finally being united into One Big Happy, with Steven Glass (formerly "Mac OS 9's top dog") taking overall responsibility for operating system quality assurance and engineering, and Bertrand Serlet (who was reportedly instrumental in debloatifying our new OS) heading up Mac OS X research.

Is the end of this latest Hatfield-McCoy feud a sign of an older, wiser Steve? Or is it just a temporary respite until the epic Desktop-vs.-Portables war heats up this summer? Only time will tell...

Take off those black armbands and stop mourning, because Clarus lives! Through the latter stages of Mac OS X's long development, many of us grew concerned that the beloved dogcow, a denizen of the Macintosh operating system from the very beginning (first in the Cairo font, and then in the Page Setup dialog box), was destined to be excluded from our shiny new OS. Why would Apple callously evict such a long-lived and faithful mascot? Perhaps it's a sad result of Steve Jobs's anti-frivolity campaign, or maybe it's just that in an era of translucent colors and system-wide antialiasing, there's just no place for an anachronistic black and white bitmap (no matter how cuddly). Who knows? For whatever reason, though, Clarus was absent from the public beta, and despite the popularity of a certain "Save Our Dogcow" petition, we therefore feared for the worst.

But now that Mac OS X 10.0 is on the shelves, we're happy to report that Clarus is present-- albeit in severely downplayed form. Faithful viewer Matt Anderson pointed us towards a web page with evidence of the good news-- a screenshot revealing that Clarus is alive and well and living in a file called "localized.rsrc" buried so deep in the file system the full path would choke a rhino. Okay, so it isn't exactly a glory job, but we suppose a dogcow in the Dock is perhaps a little too much to hope for.

But fear not; out of sight doesn't necessarily mean out of mind. Faithful viewer Eric Worman reports that he's found a repeatable way to evoke Clarus's distinctive "Moof!" even though she's been stationed all the way at the bottom of the Carbon framework. When running a Classic application (he got it to work in both Illustrator 9 and Photoshop 6), he opened a file from a mounted AppleShare server, triggered another Open dialog by using the "Place" command, clicked on the pull-down menu to reveal his file path, and discovered (much to his delight) that his server's name was then showing up as "Moof"; he has kindly provided a screenshot for your edification. It just goes to show you, you can't keep a good dogcow down.