The Gay Blade's at it again, with another Naked Mole Rat Report that further cements our convictions that Mac the Knife is alive and well and squatting in a corner of the storeroom at MacEdition. Besides the inimitable voice, we also note the Rat's predilection for rumors about desktop publishing giants like Quark and Adobe-- a telltale Knife trait if ever we saw one. Sadly, we have to report that we share neither the Knife's partiality for creative recreational pharmaceuticals nor his penchant for juicy publishing industry gossip (well, okay, that one about Quark buying Adobe was a laugh and a half), and so his dirt about CTO Tim Gill leaving Quark leaves us cold.

But that's okay, since he also has some good stuff in there about a "top-secret project" being genetically spliced together in Apple's underground bunkers. It seems that once Mac OS X ships, we may finally see why Apple refused to sell off the Newton technologies after cancelling the project; according to the Rat, Apple's daring genetic engineers are recombining the Rosetta factor from Newton DNA into Mac OS X, which will result in either a modern operating system complete with world-class handwriting recognition, or a five-assed monkey. We're betting on the former.

For those of you who are wondering just why in heaven's name Apple would be stuffing an elegant PDA input method into what is decidedly a desktop operating system, don't forget about PowerBooks. The Rat claims that Apple's "next-generation" pro portable due out next year will sport a nifty trackpad capable of accepting stylus input, thus bringing Newton-style HWR to the PowerBook. Clearly this will "do to the keyboard what the iMac did to the old-school floppy disk," because obviously it's much quicker to write something on a little rectangle of plastic than it is to type it on a full-size scissor-action keyboard.

In related news, unimpeachable sources now tell us that Apple's long-awaited PDA is indeed slated to make an appearance at the Expo keynote this Wednesday. The hold up was apparently that Apple decided that handwriting recognition, while an excellent input method for a computer with a full keyboard attached, was not a suitable technology for a handheld computer. That's why Apple's PDA will instead rely upon Morse code as its text-entry protocol; characters are entered by tapping the whole unit against a hard surface in rhythmic bursts. As for why Apple decided to make people learn Morse instead of retaining the Newton's hassle-free HWR, apparently marketing research shows that Boy Scouts, naval officers, and grizzled Wild West telegraph operators are vast untapped markets in the PDA space; plus, people were willing to learn Graffiti, with its dozens of glyphs, so Morse should be a cakewalk since it only has two characters to learn. We think Apple's got a winner here!