Better late than never. (Late? Who's Late?) MacWEEK reports that Apple will take the wraps off the first developer release of Rhapsody for PowerPC next Tuesday. The Intel version should ship by Halloween. While this developer release will lack many of the technologies and niceties of the public releases of Rhapsody (most notably, the Blue Box, which allows Rhapsody to run Mac OS 8 applications), it's a momentous step in the shaping of the Mac's future. If any faithful AtAT viewers are among the 10,000 registered Apple developers who will receive DR1, we'd appreciate you dropping us a line after you've used it to let us know what you think.

Meanwhile, the Intel version's not the only cross-platform goodie heating up the Rhapsody scene. MacOS Rumors is reporting that the long-rumored Solaris port may still come to pass, as well as a less-likely Alpha version. (Solaris is Sun's version of Unix; the Alpha is Digital's chip, recently courted by Intel.) The possibility of a Solaris version intrigues us; Rumors claims that Steve Jobs has buddied up to Sun to make this possibility more likely. Could this explain his otherwise inexplicable desire to replace the Macs currently serving Apple's web site with Sun workstations? Hmmmm.

On the other hand, an Alpha port is less interesting, given the distinct possibility of that chip being bought by the monolithic Intel and promptly relegated to the dustbin of chipstory, killed by a lack of marketing so intense you'd think it was being unhyped by last year's Apple.

Mac the Knife dishes the dirt that QuickDraw 3D may be following in the footsteps of OpenDoc and other cool Apple technologies that didn't quite make it. Apparently QD3D is being segmented, with selected chunks getting mixed in to the Quicktime stew, and the rest stuffed down the virtual garbage disposal.

AtAT pauses to reflect on the folly of trying to foist an alternate standard onto a skeptical developer public when an accepted standard already exists. We've been waiting for years for Apple to voice support for the OpenGL 3D programming libraries; perhaps these rumors of QD3D's demise are not bad news, but rather the foreshadowing of an annoucement that would make Apple a real player in the 3D world. Gotta look on the bright side, ya know?

And this week's "Bitter Little Troll" award goes to Wired Magazine's Joey Anuff. Joey wrote a story on Apple's "Think Different" campaign that incidentally claimed that any Powermac on a T1 line would "get its clock cleaned by a 486 with a 28.8 modem." A post to Guy Kawasaki's EvangeList brought this to the attention of several thousand people who recognize this as a glaring factual error. When those several thousand people demanded that Wired print a retraction, Anuff's reponse was this:

"Feel free to keep spamming me and my editors, but you won't get a retraction. My casual (albeit obviously exaggerated) denigration of the Mac's internet performance is entirely justifed [sic] and totally deserved."

His full response (complete with the EvangeList administrator's comments) is available here. As far as we're concerned, opinion is one thing... but to print that a Powermac is slower than a 486 is cut and dried misrepresentation, despite Anuff's contention that he was using "obvious exaggeration." (Is it obvious to someone who's never used a Mac?) We simply think that a retraction is a reasonable request, and Anuff's gruff refusal reveals something icky about his personality. He also misspelled "Gandhi," and that irks us. ;-)