And so ends another epic four-day weekend for U.S. denizens, who more than likely gave thanks for the existence of Maalox over trivial things like food, shelter, family, and all that rot. Talk about a stressful four days; it kicked off with the traditional eat-til-you-hurt-yourself bingefest on Thursday, followed by the maim-others-if-you-have-to commencement of the holiday shopping frenzy on Friday-- which, of course, continued throughout the weekend. Why we, as a society, perpetuate this annual stressfest we'll never know. Dragging one's haggard carcass back to the office on Monday would almost seem like a blessing.

So that's the state in which most of the U.S. finds itself today as it crawls back to work. Mental heavy lifting is generally not recommended by the Surgeon General for those in such a condition. If you take a quick sweep around the 'net, you'll find that Apple-related news is still pretty much in a state of suspended animation as the community as a whole slowly eases back into the swing of things. For us, that means an absence of thrilling plot twists and edge-of-your-seat cliffhangers... a scenario that generally prompts us to fall back on lighthearted speculation on matters of little immediate importance. Now, in our present condition, even that sounds like just a little too much work-- so luckily for us, we stumbled upon someone else who took care of it for us. Those resilient folks over at MacCentral spent a little time pondering the nature of Apple's upcoming "iMovie-like" applications, which an uncharacteristically talkative Steve Jobs hinted at in Apple's last earnings report.

It's been widely surmised that one of those two applications will be some sort of DVD-authoring package, given the fact that Apple bought all of Astarte's DVD software back in April. Personally, we're a bit skeptical; by "iMovie-like," we assumed Steve meant "consumer-targeted," and making DVDs doesn't exactly sound like a typical consumer activity. (Then again, that's what most people said about desktop video, and iMovie's a hit-- so who are we to judge?) As for the other package, that's pretty much wide open, which is why we're thankful to MacCentral for introducing the possibility that it'll be some sort of Apple-branded Internet telephony software. You know, something that'll let Mac users join in on the fun of placing telephone calls via their computers for free over the Internet. After all, Apple does own the domain name "iPhone.org." We're reasonably sure the company didn't just register it in a drunken stupor one evening. (Actually, we're not sure of that at all-- it's more of a "benefit of the doubt" kind of thing.)

It's not all that far-fetched an idea. Sure, an Internet telephony application wouldn't exactly be "revolutionary," since a slew of such products already exist on the Wintel platform, but Apple could put its own unique spin on the technology to make it stand out. For instance, maybe iPhone could actually work. Our brief encounters with services like Dialpad consisted of receiving strange phone calls from someone apparently speaking backwards and underwater. The decidedly one-sided conversations generally relied heavily on our use of the phrases "What?", "We can't understand a word you're saying," and "Just spend the frickin' seven cents a minute or whatever and call us on the damn phone already!"

Now, if Apple can improve on that to the point where we could carry on an actual meaningful exchange of ideas more than half the time, the company may just have a new hit on its hands; "free long distance phone calls with every iMac (Internet subscription required)." And throw in some instant messaging features and an option for video, as the MacCentral article suggests, and suddenly iPhone's starting to look like pretty keen. Might we see something like this come Macworld Expo in January? Maybe. Is there one iota of hard evidence that justifies betting on such an unveiling? Not really. Looks like it's "wait and see" time once again.