#FF00AA

The word is that Apple’s “secrecy machine” has been kicked back into high gear ever since you-know-who returned from you-know-what. Anecdotal evidence backs that up: I’ve heard very little about tomorrow’s “It’s Only Rock and Roll” event.

Don’t drop that so casually, it’s scary as hell! I’ve always figured that Apple — the good, successful Apple we mostly love — would die with Steve Jobs, but I thought it would be a slow death, over three or four years; I absolutely do not want to believe that all it takes is Steve taking a six-month leave for unrepentant leaks to suddenly start pouring all over the place.

What makes iTunes such an odd duck for Apple is that it’s not just a Mac app — there are far more iTunes users on Windows, but there is no 64-bit Cocoa runtime for Windows. So here’s my pet theory: at some point iTunes will be rewritten using WebKit to render the UI.

Despite the creepy reminiscence of Mozilla/XUL, that’s a fantastic idea that Apple should really look into if they haven’t already. (But I’d wager they have, because it suddenly explains so much better their porting Safari to Windows. And stuff like 3D transforms in WebKit. Behold the full-Javascript Cover Flow that will bring my iMac to its knees.)