Attention, all bitter Mac purists still huddled in a corner over an SE/30 using MacWrite and an ImageWriter to crank out vituperative manifestoes about how we need to wrest control back from the NeXTies who took over Apple and ran roughshod over the One True Macintosh Experience: we have what might constitute good news for you. Now, don't get too excited-- Apple hasn't capitulated and recrafted Mac OS X to conform to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines, nor has the company seen the light and admitted that filename extensions are an inherently morally offensive way to track file metadata. And no, the rainbow Apple logo isn't back, either.

On the plus side, though, faithful viewer Edward Liu tells us that Apple has appointed a new "vice president of Software Technology" to report to Avie Tevanian-- and that according to the official press release, that new veep is none other than Dr. Guy (Bud) Tribble. For those of you unfamiliar with that fascinatingly personable name, Doc Tribble was the manager of the "original Macintosh Software team" and he "helped to design the Mac OS and user interface" back in the olden days. He has presumably also heard more annoying Star Trek jokes about furry cooing grain-eating earmuffs than most mere mortals could endure without offing themselves, so he's clearly a man of formidable mental stamina as well.

Tribble has returned to Apple from Eazel, one of the more well-known companies that went bust trying to bring Linux to the masses by grafting a decent user interface on top of the command line. Seeing as Apple has mostly attained that holy grail in Mac OS X, we figure this was a natural career progression. The good news for Mac purists, obviously, is that in his new role of "helping define the software engineering group's technical direction," Bud might see fit to put some more Mac back in Mac OS X. Of course, if you're going to grasp at that straw, you might have to find a way to ignore the fact that the guy was also the original veep of Software Engineering at NeXT, where he was a "key architect of the NextStep operating system" upon which Mac OS X is based and from where many of the operating system's unMacisms originated. But we're sure you can do it if you try real hard.

In any case, we hope that Mac users of all creeds and levels of fanaticism will welcome Bud back into the fold; we're sure that, arguments of "Mac-like" versus "NeXT-like" aside, he'll be a valuable force in making Mac OS X even better. Therefore, we should all do what we can to make Bud feel as comfortable as possible in his new role-- so here at AtAT, we hereby pledge to help by laying off the lame Tribble gags. Maybe.