You all remember Mad Libs, that wacky, nutty book game where you filled in words to make the story as humorous as possible, right? I don't think I've even seen a book of Mad Libs since the fifth grade, and at that time it took all of about thirty seconds before my friends and I, for added fun, would forego all semblance of originality and creativity and head straight for the naughty words. Anyway, wouldn't it be nice if we played a quick game of Mad Libs before we moved on to the actual informative portion of this article? Feel free to print this out and actually write in the words. I assume we're all adults here, so please, keep it clean:

I'm a big "what if" guy, so during my three-year-plus experiment over in the land of Windows, there was one particular "what if" that I couldn't help thinking about. It went a little something like this: What if you took the few good parts of Windows and merged it with most of the Mac OS? My answer to this particular question was usually, "Man, you'd have one pretty outstanding operating system."

Since there are only a smattering of Apple-branded stores strewn across this great land of ours, I imagine that a good many of you out there have not had the opportunity to actually set foot inside of one. Oh, I'm sure you've seen pictures or heard stories, some of which have grown to mythic proportions. "Steve Jobs personally mans the cash register at every store!" "They have 400,000 software titles just for the Mac there!" "I heard that the employees can smell the rank stench of Windows on you, so be careful!" "My God, it's full of stars!"

So you've rushed out and upgraded to Director 8.5. Well, maybe it no longer qualifies as a "rush," per se, since it's been out for several months now, but you get the idea. Sure, the Flash 5 and RealMedia support is great, along with a few decent interface enhancements, but hardly enough to justify this being a .5 upgrade. That is, until you add in the new 3D features. Macromedia (along with help from Intel) has finally stepped up to the 3D plate and seems poised to deliver, at long last, a cross-platform, scaleable, and bandwidth-friendly interactive 3D standard, one which actually stands a decent chance of eventually gaining broad market acceptance. While all of that is great news for developers, there remains one nagging question:

Now what?

For those Prodigal Mac readers that go WAAAYY back with me to the column's humble beginnings, which was all of about four weeks ago, you've probably noticed my fondness for analogy. I wouldn't dare disappoint both of you by skimping on this installment, so let me take you back to an experience you've probably had (or may currently be having) in some form or another.