Far be it from us to oppose angst for angst's sake, given that it's pretty much what we thrive on, but for those of you who are still bemoaning the apparent fate of Apple's Game Sprockets developer APIs, we should mention that a couple of things have set our fevered minds at rest. When ZDNet first broke its doom-and-gloom story, it sounded like Apple was throwing Sprockets out the window and driving a stake through its recent promises to make the Mac a solid gaming platform. Disappointed quotes from living saint Mark Adams of Westlake Interactive only fueled the panic.

Since then, ZDNet (whose Mac coverage is usually pretty negative-- given that Intel has its hands in the mix, we shouldn't be surprised) has backpedalled a tiny bit in the form of a Matthew Rothenberg opinion followup. Matthew (or, as we now like to call him, "Matt the Rothenberg," given his writing style's suspicious similarity to a certain eating utensil that's missing in action) notes that "it would be nuts for a PC company with as much riding on the consumer market as Apple to abandon the games market. Clearly, Apple must be working on an alternative strategy for games and Mac OS X." Well, duh. Even the original "sky is falling" ZDNet report noted that-- while downplaying the fact severely, of course. But we're slightly appeased even by Matt's half-hearted assurance that Apple's only problem has been communicating its new strategy to the games developer community. Heck, we're easy.

What really cheered us up, though, was receiving mail from Chris DeSalvo, the man who, until recently, actually "ran the Sprockets engineering team at Apple." Now, if de-emphasizing Sprockets in Mac OS X were a serious mistake, you'd expect the project leader to be pretty peeved, right? Well, guess what? According to Chris, "there are GOOD reasons for the state of Sprockets on X." For instance, he reports that fewer than five commercial games that used SoundSprocket ever shipped, so "why bother porting?" InputSprocket, as previously reported, will be replaced with the HID Manager, which Chris calls "infinitely better." Almost all of DrawSprocket is going into Mac OS X. And NetSprocket was open-sourced several months ago; work is already underway to bring it to Mac OS X. In summary, Chris says "the picture is pretty good," and that's good enough for us. Hopefully the fears about older Sprockets-built games not running on Mac OS X will turn out to be unfounded, and the only remaining issue will be whether developers who have relied heavily on Sprockets in the past will be willing to port their code over to Mac OS X's new APIs. Given how cool Mac OS X is destined to be, we're not too concerned.