One of the things we love about Mac OS Rumors (and there's a lot to love) is their unhesitating willingness to print information that is so wacky, it borders on the bizarre. Today they skeptically include a nifty little piece about how most of the Macintosh Toolbox (the collection of routines that Mac developers use in their programs) actually exists within the Windows distribution of Quicktime. Seems that when Apple was porting Quicktime to Windows, they figured the easiest way to do it was to port any of the actual Mac Toolbox routines that the Quicktime code used. Since Quicktime uses almost all of the Toolbox, almost all of the Toolbox was ported... and all of those routines exist within the free Quicktime for Windows developer kit today.

Why is this noteworthy? Well, because the act of porting Mac programs to Windows involves ripping out all of the Mac-specific Toolbox calls and replacing them with Win32 routines. But if those calls are in the Quicktime for Windows developer kit, most of those original Toolbox routines are sitting there ready to be linked in and compiled into a Windows executable. Yes, in theory you could take the source code of any Mac program, link in the Quicktime for Windows libraries, and compile a ready-to-run Windows version. So whaddaya think? Is the Quicktime Media Layer actually a Trojan Horse to sneak a Mac onto every Windows system? Well, if you've been watching us for any length of time, you know the answer is "undoubtedly." Conspiracy theories kick ass.

There are obvious caveats to this maverick porting approach, however: since the ported Toolbox routines were only written for Quicktime's use, there's no guarantee they'll work in non-Quicktime contexts. Still, the possibilities are pretty interesting. If anyone out there tries this, we'd love to hear how it goes. We'd dust off our copy of Codewarrior and try it ourselves, but we have no Windows system on which to test the executable.

By the way, everyone think happy thoughts about Rumors' head honcho Ryan Meader, who underwent oral surgery today to remove some impacted wisdom teeth. AtAT hopes he heals up nicely and is back on his feet soon.