My favorite bit of yesterday’s 2011 WWDC keynote happened during Phil Schiller’s segment on Apple’s forthcoming Mac OS X Lion update, which can be viewed at timecode 27:30 in the now available video stream. In making the case for Lion’s new peer-to-peer file sharing feature AirDrop, Schiller argued that it represents a marked improvement over good old ”sneaker net,” that reliable but unsophisticated method of copying files to a USB thumb drive and walking them across the room to a colleague. This was the image projected on the screen behind him:

The only purpose of this picture was to illustrate that USB thumb drives are inefficient, undesirable and obsolete, that these drives are an inferior solution to the one Apple was introducing just then. And yet they didn’t choose a stock image to make this point, but rather a beautifully executed illustration in the Apple style, with every detail exquisitely accounted for, including the little ring at the end. They put real work into it. Only Apple would go through the trouble of rendering the objects of its disdain so well.

Presumably for a class project, design student Fatimah Kabba interpreted the practice of graphic design as a board game. When I first heard the idea I was not prepared for how convincingly well-realized the final product would be.

Plenty more beautiful pictures here.

Earlier this year I wrote about the prolific comics blogger and Web gallerist John Hilgart, known as Half-Man Half-Static. In truth, his comics-related projects are so interesting to me that I find it hard to resist writing about every single one of them, especially the ones centered around 4CP, his fantastic blog/gallery of extreme details of comic book panels.

Here᾿s another project he’s doing over at the online magazine HiLobrow: every Friday, the site is running a themed selection of 4CP images, assembled by a guest curator. The first installment, last Friday’s “Lonely Crowd” featured moments of 4CP’s trademark stillness within renderings of crowds of people.

This Friday’s installment is all about shadows and the wonderfully expressionist conventions that comics artists have used to render them. As populist expressions of real art, I would take any of these over the paintings of the overrated Roy Lichtenstein any day. See more here.

Forbes media chairman and former presidential candidate Steve Forbes’ thoughts on digital publishing: paid subscriptions cannot match advertising revenue, “unimpeded access to content and conversation” is paramount, content apps are a non-starter, and the browser is the way forward for publishing content on tablets. It’s weird for me to be in pretty much total agreement with a guy who believed in the flat tax, but hey, life is a box of chocolates.

More details at PaidContent.

Designer and collage artist Able Parris just relaunched his Web site. He’s a friend and I’m a fan, so this is great news for me.

It’s beautiful stuff. Check it out here.

This photographer published a book of stunning photographs taken with his iPhone 4 and the app Camera+. The results are somewhat uneven and a bit showy, but it’s amazing that they were all captured — and processed — with such basic tools.

Read the write-up at Camera+ publisher Tap Tap Tap’s blog here.

There are nerds and there are dressers, and supposedly never the twain shall meet. Virtually every attempt at computer stuff-as-fashion results in just plain ugly, and just about every expression of fashion-as-computer stuff is unusable or impractical, but I don’t really see why that has to be so. It shouldn’t be that hard to create utilitarian and beautiful computing accessories.

Singaporean accessory maker Fabrix are trying to do just that. They’ve just announced their Black Satchel briefcase-style laptop bag intended specifically for the MacBook Air, and it’s a looker.

It’s still not quite the case that I would buy in an instant if I could have any case I could imagine, but it’s closer than anything I’ve seen before. Get yours here.

Photographs of twenty-five immense, futuristic, and unintentionally dystopian structures commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate the sites of significant battles during the Second World War. They were designed by various sculptors and architects in a architectural visual language intended to evoke the strength of the Socialist Republic, but were essentially abandoned after its dissolution in the 1990s.

You can see all twenty-five photos here.

This project from UCLA lets you overlay historical maps of any one of about twenty cities onto contemporary satellite photos of that same city, all in a Google Maps-based interface. It makes for a fascinating comparative exercise, and doubles as a good reminder that as authoritative as information graphics might seem to be — many of these maps were canonical in their day — they can still be quite subjective and even misleading, especially with the benefit of historical hindsight.

You can play with Hypercities over here.

Sculptor Alan Wolfson created this “core sample of a city street. As though you took a street, dug it up, and lifted it straight off the earth.” Roughly a two foot cube, this model reproduces in beautiful miniaturized detail everything from the air conditioning unit installed above the entrance to a pizza parlor to the interior of the pizza parlor itself to the subway station directly beneath it.

This sculpture will be on display in June in New York at the Museum of Arts and Design’s exhibition “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities” but you can see close-ups at the sculptor’s Web site.