Whoa, Nelly; after crawling through the desert of a Mac news drought, there's nothing more refreshing than a healthy dose of good ol' litigation to slake one's thirst for drama. Sadly, Apple Legal's latest clash pales in comparison to some of its classic conflicts, like all those iMac knockoff lawsuits or the time it sued the unnamed "Worker Bee" for trade secret violation. In fact, this time the company is playing defense, which is typically less exciting from an Apple-watcher's perspective-- and this particular case certainly isn't as thrilling as when, for instance, Imatec wanted a billion dollars for alleged patent infringement in ColorSync. Still, given how little is shaking in the Mac world, we're happy to glom onto every little bit of drama we can find... and there's at least one interesting twist in this case that tickles our fancy.

Here's the deal: according to a MacCentral article, Pitney Bowes (the company best known to the average shmoe as "the guys that make that automatic postage meter thing I abuse at work when the boss isn't looking") has filed suit against a whole slew of companies for supposedly infringing its "272 patent," and Apple is one of the accused-- along with several alleged partners in crime including Xerox, Lexmark, Panasonic, NEC, and others. This mysterious "272 patent" reportedly "describes a method for altering the dot size used to produce characters on a printed page," which is why all of the companies named in the suit are laser printer manufacturers.

Wait, did we say "are"? We meant "were." Here's the plot twist: Apple's inclusion in this suit is particularly vexing, because Pitney Bowes claims that the LaserWriter is the offending product-- and Apple hasn't sold the LaserWriter (or, indeed, any printer) for years, now. Unless Pitney Bowes can back up its vague claim that "other Apple products might have infringed the patent as well," Apple's going to be fighting a lawsuit based purely on whether or not it infringed a patent in a product it no longer sells. When informed of this development, we're just hoping that Pitney Bowes doesn't come after the owners, instead; our ancient LaserWriter IINT keeps cranking out the pages like a champ, but if we have to put a pack of lawyers on retainer just to hold onto it, we're going to be begging in the streets with signs that say "WILL WORK FOR TONER CARTRIDGES."

Pitney Bowes is hoping to "negotiate a settlement" with each of the defendants, presumably in the form of a licensing fee to keep cranking out printers just as they've always done. (Hewlett Packard apparently lobbed $400 million at PB in an earlier "patent 272" suit to get the lawyers off its back.) That may be a reasonable course of action for most of those companies, who still make printers and thus have an existing business to protect; what about Apple? Somehow we just don't see Steve spending a few hundred million bucks to license technology used in products that he himself nuked from the product list three years back. We expect Apple Legal to get a good workout fighting this one.

Our love/hate relationship with Mac OS X's controversial Dock continues. On the one hand, we really want to love it unconditionally: it stores aliases, minimized windows, and running applications all in one convenient place; its magnification and Genie Effect features provide hours of entertainment to the easily amused; and above all else, it's gol-durned pretty. But unfortunately, every single time we switch back to Mac OS 9.1 or 8.6 after an extended Mac OS X session, we find ourselves a bazillion times more productive, and a big part of that difference can be described in two words: tabbed folders.

Yes, we admit it: we are confirmed and unrepentant tabbed folder junkies. If you're using Mac OS 8.5 through 9.1 and you're not using tabbed folders, you're missing out on one of the greatest inventions since the pogo stick. Just drag any Finder window to the bottom of the screen, and voilà-- it turns into a tab containing just the folder's name and small icon. Click on the tab (or drag a file onto it), and the whole window pops up, ready for use; when you're done, the window automatically collapses back into a handy space-saving tab again. We find this feature so useful, we literally have tabs all the way across the bottoms of our screens. Most are windows containing aliases to various applications grouped by type and set to "View as Buttons," for easy one-click launch and for dragging files onto.

Sadly, Mac OS X is sorely lacking when it comes to such efficient use of space. Things have been improving, though, such as when Apple added hierarchical folder menus to the Dock. Back in the public beta, sticking a folder in the Dock gave you an icon which, when clicked, opened the folder. Whoopee. Since Mac OS X 1.0, however, clicking and holding on a docked folder produces (eventually-- it's pretty slow) a hierarchical menu of that folder's contents. That's a step up, but it's still not quite as convenient as tabbed folders-- primarily because you can't drag a file onto the docked folder and through the menu hierarchy. If Apple adds just that one little feature, we'll be a lot happier.

But who says Apple has to stop there? Despite our continued DSL outage, faithful viewer Jay Runquist of MacAnonymous.com still sought us out to call attention to a nifty little story over at Mac OS Rumors: reportedly Apple is playing with the idea of bringing tabs to the Dock in full force. If the rumors are true, then a future version of the Dock might allow each user to define tabs that alter what items appear in the Dock when each one is clicked. Personally, we're not entirely sure how well that would work (since aliases to applications and running apps are currently all thrown together), but we're all for any improvements that will allow the Dock to hold more stuff in less space. If a tabbed Dock feature surfaces in Mac OS X 10.2 next year, we'll eagerly take it for a spin; maybe by then we can stop feeling guilty for preferring Mac OS 9's functional interface to Mac OS X's, despite Aqua's dazzling good looks.

By now you probably figured you'd effectively heard the last of "Redmond Justice," right? After all, it's been years since the Department of Justice filed suit against Microsoft primarily for bundling Internet Explorer with Windows 95; remember the rush to get the suit together before Windows 98 shipped? Heck, it's even been over a year since Microsoft was found to have violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, and ever since then we've just been waiting for the appeal to proceed-- a process which makes continental drift seem peppy by comparison. So you probably figured your great-grandchildren would be long dead of old age before this case winds to a real conclusion.

Well, maybe so, but don't let that fact get you down, because you may have a completely new trial to follow soon enough. As faithful viewer Nicholas Chapman points out, a ZDNet article indicates that "two of the state attorneys general who spearheaded the antitrust case against Microsoft" are apparently considering filing another antitrust suit against the Redmond Giant-- a scenario that leaves us feeling not unlike being told that we have to sit through all that election debate about "hanging chads" again. In other words, it was kind of interesting the first time through (for the first seventy or eighty years, at any rate), but the idea of going through it again has us wondering if we could drive a pencil deep enough into our own skulls to bring sweet, sweet oblivion.

If it does come to pass, this new case will focus on Microsoft's "very troubling" strategy for Windows XP-- namely, using the exact same "monopolistic business tactics" the company has refined and perfected over the years. (Practice makes perfect, right?) Between "integrated" instant messaging and the "Smart Tags" feature that will give Microsoft a degree of control over how third-party web sites appear to its hapless customers, Microsoft has the art of thumbing its nose at the Justice Department down to a science. If the attorneys general are actually surprised at Microsoft's continued anticompetitive behavior, they should consider that so far, the company's only punishment for past misdeeds has been a temporary stock price deflation (which hurt the rest of the economy more than it hurt Microsoft) and a pile of legal bills which amounts to chicken feed for a company with a Bill-size balance sheet. Why not stay the course? According to all observable evidence, in this case, crime pays and it does pay well.

Thankfully, as of now the attorneys general state that they "have no current plans for a second lawsuit," though they "would never completely rule out" the possibility, either. For now they're content to focus on the existing antitrust case that's still inching its way through the legal system, but if Microsoft doesn't lighten up a little, before long, we may find ourselves faced with "Redmond Justice 2: Electric Boogaloo": the antitrust equivalent of yet another Brady Bunch variety hour. Make those suicide pacts now, kids!