Call off the search parties, people-- contrary to popular belief, we're not lost in the woods and forced to survive on tree bark and funny-tasting mushrooms, though we can certainly understand how the lack of a new episode yesterday might have given you that impression. The reality, though, is that we were safe and sound within the confines of the AtAT compound all along, and any bark or funny-tasting mushrooms we may have ingested were consumed purely by choice rather than out of necessity.

We just completely forgot that most of the rest of the country (not to mention the rest of the world) doesn't celebrate Patriots Day, but here in Boston, at least, it's still a big enough deal that lots of us get the day off from work to dress up like Minutemen and watch Kenyans run excessive distances. And since the AtAT compound is literally across the street from Lexington (yes, that Lexington, of "Lexington and Concord" fame), well, it'd be downright treasonous not to take the day off to exercise our inalienable right to watch bad TV and recreate various historical revolutionary battles in Escape Velocity: Nova. No one's going to doubt our patriotism, by cracky.

So, we're sorry that we forgot to make that plan absolutely clear. At least those of you who made a "confused Scooby-Doo" noise when you saw us mention the "holiday weekend" in Friday's episode now know just what the heck we were talking about. But even without the benefit of knowing about Patriots Day, we're surprised that so many of you made a mental leap straight to the "lost in the woods" scenario and called the authorities instead of drawing a far more likely conclusion: that we were way too busy indulging in native Mac OS X image-editing bliss to mess around with producing a soap opera. That's right, folks, Patriots Day be hanged-- for Mac users, yesterday was a far more important occasion: Carbonized Photoshop Day.

Well, okay, technically today's the red letter day, if you go by Adobe's official press release, but the fact of the matter is that Photoshop 7.0 (with complete Mac OS X support) actually shipped a few days ago, as we were breathlessly informed by faithful viewer Jason Wiley. And we don't mean "shipped" in the Jobsian sense, which would mean it might be another three weeks before any actual human being gets to see this allegedly shipping product; some excruciatingly lucky individuals already have their copies in hand-- individuals such as faithful viewer Jean-Pierre, who found his own copy on his back porch last night. Yessir, there's a whole lot of Aqua Photoshoppin' goin' on. You've heard of the "shot heard 'round the world"? Well, this here's the app heard 'round the world.

In fact, do you hear that? That's the sound of lots more people upgrading to Mac OS X, now that their main productivity app runs native. Indeed, now that we've got Office and Photoshop, there's only one major product left that might be holding a slew of professionals back: QuarkXPress. But don't expect a native version of that any time soon; a major 5.0 upgrade shipped just a few months ago, sans Carbonization, and if the Naked Mole Rat hasn't been chomping on his own stash of funny-tasting mushrooms lately, it sounds like Quark's putting a much higher priority on QuarkDMS development than on cranking out some Aqua-y goodness. Still, it's not a matter of if, but when-- but once graphics professionals get a taste of Photoshop running in full Aqua splendor, we imagine they might get a little antsy.

Antsy enough to make the jump to InDesign, maybe? Well, that's between them and their Pantone colors. As for us, we're just happy to know that our own copy of Photoshop is on its way. So the next time we skip an episode unexpectedly, just remember-- it's because we're pushing pixels. Or because it's Arbor Day.