Apple collector and mobile technologist Jonathan Zufi is assembling a collection of beautifully-shot photographs from 35 years of Apple products. Even though the site seems to have just gotten started, his aim, apparently, is to have shots of everything Apple has released. Here’s a wonderful detail shot from a PowerBook model that I owned a decade ago:

If he succeeds in building this out as a more or less complete repository of these kinds of images, this will be a wonderful resource. You can explore what’s there currently over at Shrine of Apple.

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Steve Jobs famously said about iPad competitors that “If you see a stylus, they blew it,” alluding to his own belief that pen-based computing is a non-starter for the vast majority of users. Longstanding pen-and-tablet hardware manufacturer Wacom has a new product called Inkling (not to be confused with the textbook app platform) that suggests perhaps that computer-based pens might do better.

Inkling is a combination of a proprietary pen and a sensor that clips onto the top of any sheet of paper. The pen is used like any other pen (it’s even filled with ink) and the sensor captures the marks and strokes in digital form. When the drawing is complete, the user hooks up the sensor to the computer (inelegantly, a USB cable is required), the strokes can be translated into raster or vector art. The high-production value demonstration video makes it look very smooth, though videos like this always do. If the final, shipping product is able to produce faithfully rendered vector files, though, I’ll be impressed, even if I remain skeptical that this product really makes much sense for many people. Inkling ships in September so we’ll see. Find out more here.

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Even though director Robert Altman is one of my favorite filmmakers — I wrote a little about him five years ago in this post — I wasn’t crazy for every single one of his works. His 1977 film “3 Women,” for instance, is one of the harder to parse entries in his canon. I came across this movie poster for it today:

What an amazing, visually lyrical, yet fully enigmatic poster. Like the movie, it demands closer inspection, even if it’s withholding in what it’s willing to reveal about the plot or even the damn point of the film. It’s true that “3 Women” wasn’t my favorite Altman film, but I’m glad I saw it, and I’m glad it was made, and this poster is a brilliant complement to it. I can’t imagine any contemporary film — even an independent one — being promoted with a poster like this in today’s film climate, just as I can’t imagine a movie like “3 Women” being made today.

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Dan Hipp’s extraordinarily lively illustrations are borne of some mash-up universe in which comics, sci-fi and action-adventure fiction have both been flipped over on their backs, only to reveal their shockingly adorable undersides. Here’s an example in which everyone’s favorite boy reporter, Tin Tin wanders into Alien territory.

Hipp has tons of similarly playful and resoundingly vibrant works throughout this blog. Looking through them all, it becomes apparent that his is a talent that is truly only possible in this digital century, in which ideas can’t help but cross-fertilize, breaking the boundaries of franchises and intellectual property, and resulting in such agreeable end products. Check it all out here.

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Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia-based illustrator Tang Yau Hoong is a master of warping negative-space to create surprising pictorial illusions.

Some of his work recalls the brainy, minimalistic surrealism of Guy Billout, of whom I’m a huge fan. This similarity is true occasionally in Tang’s style but more often in the sheer wit of the work. See his full portfolio here.

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My friend Anil Dash is smart and eloquent and capable of writing blog posts that floor you with their insight and their almost pitch perfect understanding of the form. You can explore the entirety of Dashes.com to enjoy them all, but his most recent entry, published just today, has got to be some kind of high-water mark.

Anil argues that the single greatest entrepreneur of our time is a living refutation of the oft-touted conservative fallacy and propagandistic line that liberal values are bad for business. In fact, this individual personifies the successful realization of liberalism. I tried to choose an excerpt to quote here, but the whole thing is so good, it demands to be read in its entirety.

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One of the things I like in imagery — photographic or graphic — is when an artist or a curator is able to capture the quietude hidden within moments of great activity. This is why I like photographer Carli Davidson’s shots of pets shaking their heads so much, and why I can’t stop talking about John Hilgart’s 4CP project. These bodies of work unearth the fleeting elegance buried in unexpected places and demonstrate that the more closely we look at things, the more likely we’ll see beauty.

This is also why I’m crazy for Space Trek an image blog that finds great, unexpected moments of quietude in the original “Star Trek” television show from the late 1960s. Here’s one example:

Space Trek’s purpose is to show us “The quiet despair of the Starship Enterprise,” and it does this by highlighting the transitional moments from the television show that we normally don’t pay much attention to. Each screen capture is like a little portrait of the show’s flimsily makeshift architecture and sickly technicolor lighting. They remind me how eerie the show felt to me when I saw it for the first time, in endless reruns, as a kid. The show was not just fantastic, it was strange and somewhat off, almost unseemly in its otherworldliness. That’s something that seems to have been lost in nearly every reboot of the franchise since. Anyway, Space Trek is worth a look; see it here.

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