People who know a lot more about the future than me tend to predict that someday soon that we’ll use software through voice command or even through dimensional gesturing in the style of “Minority Report.” Maybe that will happen and maybe it won’t. But my favorite alternative — or rather supplement — to the windows, mouse and pointer paradigm of controlling software is here today and it’s underrated: messaging. SMS on my phone, for sure, but definitely email.

Like most people, I’m sure, I spend the majority of my day in front of my email program. So when I can do something outside of the natural capable boundaries of email using that same, highly familiar interface, it feels like a real win.

Over the course of several days last week, I spent a pretty sizable chunk of time trying to work out the kinks in Apple’s disappointingly buggy MobileMe service, the new incarnation of their equally error-prone .Mac. By the end of this first prolonged exposure to the service, I’ve decided that I feel exactly the same way about MobileMe as I did about its predecessor: ideally I’d like it to do much more, but at the very least I wish the stuff it does would work a lot better than it does. And when it doesn’t work, which is far more often than I’d like, it is in my view one of the most frustrating experiences that Apple has ever produced.

Like me, lots of folks are dependent on the features that MobileMe provides, so simply voting with our wallets, i.e., canceling our accounts in protest, isn’t as straightforward an option as some would argue. For me, over-the-air synchronization for my iPhone is something I’ve needed since the first day I bought it. Right now, MobileMe is the only viable option.

There’s plenty to like about the iPhone 2.0 Software Update, not the least of which is the fact that it now officially supports a brand new world of third-party applications. However, I’m only being a little facetious when I say that for me Apple really dropped the ball with its Contacts module.

Apple’s new MobileMe service is due out before too long, and I’m pretty excited about it. In particular, I’m looking forward to what I hope will be a wholesale remedying of the many irritating shortcomings of its predecessor, the useful but error-prone .Mac service.

I know that I’ve said it before, but I’m really inclined to repeat it until a solution for its many problems is actually in place (and not just marketed) — .Mac is a very poor service. In my estimation, it falls far short of the high bar for excellence that Apple has consistently set for itself and met over the past decade.

Whether or not Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” turns out to be any good when it’s released later this month, I want to just enjoy for a little while longer the situation that we’re in right now. That is, we live in a world in which the most recent Batman movie, Nolan’s three-year old “Batman Begins,” was actually a very good film. For my money, it’s about as rich a super-hero movie as any Hollywood has produced, but I’ll even settle for just a pretty good movie based on what came before it.