Darren Aronofsky’s new film starring Mickey Rourke looks terrific. Hard to imagine anyone better suited to this role than Rourke.

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It’s always entertaining when the world gets a look at Microsoft email messages released as evidence in a court case. Todd Bishop explores some 2005 emails between Rob Enderle and Microsoft executives, including Steve Ballmer, wherein Enderle suggests that the confusing array of different Vista versions was a bad idea. For once, Enderle was right.

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A thoroughly researched epic typographic saga, by Paul Shaw.

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Comprehensive coverage from Jesse David Hollington for iLounge, describing and showing what’s new in today’s iPhone OS 2.2 update.

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When you save a picture to your photo roll from email or the web, if the picture is larger than the iPhone display (480 × 320 pixels), the iPhone displays a scaled-up thumbnail rather than a scaled-down version of the large image. Here’s another description of the problem, with more examples, from Scott Johnson.

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Fabulous collection of “The End” movie title cards. Needless to say, this one is my favorite.

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Technical information regarding the formats Netflix uses for video streaming.

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Safari now supports EV SSL certificates, and is using a blacklist of known phishing domains supplied by Google.

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Steven Heller interviews Sol Sender, the designer of the Obama campaign’s “O” logo.

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John Paczkowski on the Mozilla Foundation’s finances:

[…] its revenue for 2007 totaled $75.1 million, up 13 percent from 2006’s $66.8 million. And 88 percent of that came directly from Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine in it Firefox browser.

So Mozilla is utterly dependent on Google for its revenue, but competing directly against them with Firefox vs. Chrome. That’s a weird relationship.

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My thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Billings 3. Billings is a time-tracking and invoicing app with a simple, clear, and very stylish interface. It also produces gorgeous invoices. I would have killed for this app back in my freelancing days.

Billings 3 normally sells for $59, but is currently on sale for $40. (Upgrades are on sale too.)

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iPhoneHellas.gr was right — iPhone OS 2.2 was released today. Here are Apple’s security-related release notes.

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Ryan Singer on Ffffound’s excellent keyboard shortcuts. Design isn’t just how things look — it’s about the experience of using them. (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture uses similar shortcuts.)

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DF reader Mark Handel, via email:

I can’t remember — does the iPod Touch have a proximity sensor? If it does not, that’s probably the reason that the proximity sensor is undocumented: Apple is trying to keep a very common “reference” hardware platform in the API. I think it was you who mentioned the problem with Android being that there was not a common hardware model: some have only touch screens, some have keyboards, etc.

The iPod Touch does not have a proximity sensor. The primary — and perhaps only — reason the iPhone does is so the screen can turn off and stop accepting touch input when you’re holding it to your ear for a call. I’m not sure this explains why the more useful proximity sensor APIs are undocumented, but it’s an interesting theory. And, clearly, some of the iPhone-only hardware features — the camera and microphone come to mind — are very much documented in the public APIs.

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New section on Apple’s iPhone web site promoting third-party apps. Interesting for at least two reasons: (1) I’ve already found a couple of interesting apps I’d never heard of before, and (2) it shows you which iPhone apps Apple considers worth showing off.

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Andy Baio:

Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?

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This is the app that the Swedish carrier Telia will be providing to Swedish iPhone users.

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Jonathan Hoefler has an example of pixel-based typography from 1567.

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With actual, albeit sparse, release notes:

Third-party Remote Controls — Apple TV can now learn other remote controls and use them in addition to the Apple Remote.

I can’t find any developer documentation for this yet. Update: Ah, I see, it’s a feature that allows the Apple TV to pair with existing universal remotes.

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Tweetie, a brand-new $3 iPhone Twitter client by Loren Brichter, is now available from the App Store. I’ve been using beta versions for a few weeks, and it is currently my favorite iPhone Twitter client by far. Tweetie shares a few conceptual similarities with Tweetsville, another very good new iPhone Twitter client — both take a very different approach than the king of the hill, Twitterrific.

The biggest difference is that both Tweetie and Tweetsville support loading additional tweets from further back in your timeline when you get to the end of the list. This makes it possible to “catch up” with older tweets in a way that just isn’t possible with Twitterrific. Tweetie also makes it possible to view individual users’ timelines within the app, using a left-to-right “drilling down” metaphor that allows you to go back to where you were. Tweetie wins out over Tweetsville by being faster, more stable (Tweetsville seems to more frequently run into low-memory situations when showing inline web views), and offering a more carefully thought out interface. The only thing I dislike about Tweetie is the SMS/iChat-style tweet list.

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