Well, it was touch and go for a minute, there, but your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff is now in stable condition and recovering nicely, thank you. There we were, enjoying a nice, sedate Sunday and catching up on a week's worth of TiVo, when we made the near-fatal mistake of firing up the PowerBook to see if anything was shaking in the weekend world of Mac news. Considering that, news-wise, the action on Sundays generally falls into the "So Subdued It Might Be Dead" category, we simply weren't prepared for the massive shock of discovering that Adobe has finally officially announced a Mac OS X-native version of Photoshop. (Faithful viewer cbyoshi tried to warn us; if only we had thought to check our email first...)

Needless to say, despite the fact that we had (somewhat skeptically) already mentioned the possibility of such an announcement touching down today, our brains simply weren't prepared for the sheer psychic shock of seeing rumor become reality a full day early. As our heads grew light, our left arms became numb, our vision dimmed, and our all-too-pathetic lives flashed before our eyes ("Love Boat"... "Love Boat"... "Almost got off the couch"... "Love Boat"...), we idly pondered the Great Questions that would surely be answered in the afterlife: "Why are we here?" "What is our purpose in life?" "Who were the marketing wizards who decided to announce a long-awaited new product on Sunday, let alone the Sunday after a major trade show attended by a zillion potential customers who have been gagging for said product for ages, now?" Seconds later, we lost consciousness.

Luckily for us, while dozens of AtAT viewers saw the news and merely emailed us in hopes of securing a credit on the show, a few of our more astute fans immediately recognized that, having unexpectedly encountered the stark reality of an imminent Carbonized Photoshop, we'd most likely be twitching on the floor and swallowing our own tongues. Many thanks to whoever played the odds and had the ambulance sent over; your intuition is impeccable. We're expected to make a full recovery, though the doctors say we should take it easy for a while and avoid strenuous physical activity. Yeah, that'll be a tough change to accommodate. Where's the remote?

Incidentally, we probably owe our lives to the fact that Adobe's official press release states that Photoshop 7.0 won't actually be shipping for another couple of months yet (Adobe says "second quarter," while the pre-order links from Apple's spotlight page estimate "April"); had we encountered the phrase "immediate availability" in that context, our hearts would probably have exploded right out of our chests. And you know how tough something like that is for the legatees to clean off the furniture.