I certainly don’t bemoan the fact that the iPhone now has a robust, creative and genuinely delightful market for sanctioned, third-party applications, but jeebus does my iPhone crash a lot. To me it’s proof positive that, in dividing its attention between this device, Mac OS X, Macintosh hardware, iPods and half-assed Web applications and services, Apple’s previously sterling quality levels have slipped notably. Just try using my post-2.0 update iPhone — or similar iPhones owned by many of my friends — without freezes or crashes. I bet you can’t.

“How do you arrest gravity? How do you freeze time? It is at this point that art and science converge. You can see that convergence in action in ‘Imageless: The Scientific Study and Experimental Treatment of an Ad Reinhardt Black Painting,” a small, engrossing, meditative exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum.”

An old message in which Gates details his experience trying to find, purchase, download and install his company’s own MovieMaker software.

Science reporter John Tierney says, “I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these ten things.” With a follow-up on his blog, Tierney Lab.

“A school employee in Sichuan Province has been ordered to a labor camp for a year for taking photographs of schools that collapsed in the powerful May 12 earthquake and posting them on the Internet, a human rights group reported Wednesday.”

The magazine’s “resident comic-book expert” on Comic-Con.

Hilarious.

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.

New graphical work from the candidate’s campaign evokes “die neue typographie.” Via The Daily Heller.

I don’t have a back yard (yet) but I almost want to buy one of these today anyway.

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.

Well, they weren’t all exactly “great.”

“No cameras or lights were used. Instead two technologies were used to capture 3D images: Geometric Informatics and Velodyne LIDAR.” Beautiful if gimmicky, like the best music videos. By the way, I wasn’t much of a Radiohead fan before “In Rainbows” came out, but I’m still listening to this album several days a week.

A new project from independent designer David Airey profiling famous logo designers.

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.

BBC.co.uk applies some of the thinking I’ve done around grids to its new, wider page template.

Felix details the work he did for us designing a bucketload of icons for our iPhone application.

Lively line work and color.

A brief remembrance of the recently deceased New York editor.

Forthcoming coffee table book featuring satirical cereal box illustrations.

Coming with the 11 Jul release of iPhone 2.0 software, the App Store and iTunes 7.7: “Use the new Remote application for iPhone or iPod touch to control iTunes playback from anywhere in your home — a free download from the App Store”

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.

Nice design portfolio from Alex Haigh, particularly his typeface BAQ Rounded.

“Fox News featured photos of Jacques Steinberg and Steven Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered — the journalists’ teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe’s hair moved further back on his head.” Amazing.

Thanks in part to McFly 2015.

“The Carsonified team have set ourselves a challenge this week: to build a Web app in four days (32 hours) and we’re launching tomorrow at 5:30 PM GMT.”

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.

“Monthly musings on the mysteries of branding.” Thanks to Jeremy.