Ask and ye shall receive (and receive and receive). Just yesterday we were wondering whether Apple would cram one more product announcement into an already-overstuffed month before June melted into July, and apparently Apple was listening and decided to toss us a bone. You remember Rendezvous, yes? It originally shipped as a new technology in Jaguar, and it's kindasorta like AppleTalk for TCP/IP, enabling zero-configuration auto-discovery of devices and services on a local network. In other words, it lets you print without having to type in the printer's network address, it lets you see your officemates in your iChat Buddy List without adding them by hand, etc. Good stuff.

Well, when Rendezvous was first announced, Apple said it was an open protocol, and now the company is apparently actively pushing it as such. Have you checked out Apple's developer page on Rendezvous today? (You do check it daily, right? Why, of course you do.) Because as faithful viewer Scott Geenvish points out, Apple has just posted a "Technology Preview" release of-- you guessed it-- Rendezvous for Windows. Chalk it up as just one more Apple product-- like QuickTime, iTunes, and AppleWorks (if you can find it)-- you can bolt onto a Windows system to make it slightly more Mac-like and slightly less unbearable. While it's mostly for developers to mess with so they can add Rendezvous auto-discovery to their Windows applications, the preview apparently allows Windows systems to print to printers shared on a local AirPort Extreme/Express Base Station, so it might be useful to select non-developers as well.

But wait, there's more! Act now and you also get a Technology Preview of Rendezvous for Linux, Solaris, and FreeBSD. That's right, you POSIX-compliant-OS-using folks out there, Apple didn't forget about you either. And if you order in the next ten minutes, you also get Rendezvous for Java Clients absolutely free! Clearly Apple's trying to shove Rendezvous into everything from crab cakes to toothpaste, and our future is gleaming bright with the prospect of IP-enabled, auto-discovering, zero-configuration Thermos flasks and fruity revitalizing shampoos.

What, as far as product announcements go you don't think it's quite up to the standard of new Power Macs and displays and the iTunes Music Store crossing the pond? Well, geez, give Apple a break-- WWDC is a developers' conference, after all, so you have to expect a certain amount of geeks-only content, and in any event the company must surely be scraping the bottom of the Announcement Barrel™ after the rest of this whirlwind month o' fun. So just marvel at the sheer unlikelihood that we'd have gotten anything more at all in June, look forward to a fresh start in July, and ponder the advent of a world in which everything's wired together but no one types addresses anymore. It's like some sort of beautiful dream...