You know, it's been hours since we've been infuriated by an especially shameless Wintel knockoff of an Apple product, and you'd think that would be a good thing. But as it turns out, we've become so conditioned to acute indignation caused by the blithe theft of Apple's best ideas, when we go without it for too long our blood sugar drops sharply and we get the shakes. Prolonged deprivation would probably lead to coma and, eventually, death-- so thank heavens faithful viewer Nicolas sent us a self-righteous outrage booster all the way from Belgium in the form of a link to a certain little software product called WinExposé. You get three guesses what it does. The first four don't count.

Yes, kiddies, it was only a matter of time; someone's copied Panther's Exposé feature and made it available to users of Windows 98, Me, 2000, and XP for the low, low price of just $9.95. And when we say "copied," we don't mean that someone sat down and wrote some software that does something kinda sorta similar; we mean it was copied, down to the teensiest detail. One keystroke scales, tiles, and moves all application windows and lets you click on one to bring it forward; another keystroke does the same for only the current application's windows; a third reveals the desktop. It also supports screen corner activation. Run the (admittedly nifty) Flash-based demo to see just how similar it is. So much for Apple's claim that "you won't find it anywhere else."

Interestingly, though perhaps not surprisingly, there seems to be absolutely zero reference on the entire WinExposé web site to Exposé, Apple, or Mac OS X. There is a "Frequently Asked Questions" page, however (which only contains one actual question, but hey, whatever), although we find it hard to believe that the company's most frequently-asked question is "What is it?" and not "Have you no shame?"

Of course, what some Mac users might find most galling of all is that there's no Mac port of the product. We know at least a few Jaguar users who would gladly shell out ten clams for MacWinExposé instead of paying $129 for Panther's 149 other new features. Maybe when 2.0 comes out, hmmmm?

We haven't a clue as to whether or not Apple has grounds for legal action. We don't know if the company patented Exposé's window-switching method, and strangely enough, the Exposé page is noticeably devoid of ™ and ® symbols; Exposé isn't listed as a live Apple trademark in the database of the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office, nor is it listed (registered or otherwise) on Apple's own Trademark List, which includes such obscure titles as "En Passant®" and "Noiroia™." We have a feeling that if Apple's legal team felt it had any case whatsoever, the WinExposé site would already be down, so it looks like we'll be able to tap into this particular source of copycat outrage for a while, yet. And it's a good thing, too-- we haven't felt this healthy since the eOne!

ADDENDUM: Well, isn't this interesting-- faithful viewer CookieCrisp notes that Exposé now does show up in a USPTO trademark search on "Apple Computer," whereas mere hours ago we can assure you that it did not. We still have last night's original search window open, with 259 live trademarks found; now there are 260, and Exposé tops the list, filed on December 22nd, 2003. As of right this second, it's still not on Apple's January 2004 trademark list, but we suppose that could change any time now. Bring on the lawyers!