Apple announced in a press release today that Bertrand Serlet, senior vice president of Mac Software Engineering, and one of the lead creators and developers of Mac OS X, is leaving the company. Here’s Serlet on his departure:

“I’ve worked with Steve for 22 years and have had an incredible time developing products at both NeXT and Apple, but at this point, I want to focus less on products and more on science,”

Taking his place is Craig Federighi, Apple’s current vice president of Mac Software Engineering. Serlet has this to say about his successor:

“Craig has done a great job managing the Mac OS team for the past two years, Lion is a great release and the transition should be seamless.”

This is obviously pretty major news for the Mac platform, since Mac OS X Lion is due for release this summer. John Gruber of DaringFireball describes Bertrand Serlet as “one of the good guys” and says “It’s hard to overstate how influential he’s been in the creation of the core OS and Cocoa libraries. He’s been building, revising, iterating, and improving this system since 1989.”

Some are taking this as a bad sign for the Mac, including several tech tabloids that I won’t bother linking to who propose all sorts of conspiracy theories and more end-of-the-Mac type scenarios that are equally ridiculous. I don’t buy that idea and neither should you, the Mac will obviously evolve but almost certainly be around for many years to come.

You can read the full press release at Apple.com.

You may remember that YouTube video that went viral a few years back called “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years” – it featured photographer Noah Kalina taking a self portrait every day over the course of six years, and then all the pictures are put together in a movie. It’s interesting to watch since people obviously change a fair amount over six years.

Now there’s an iPhone app that lets you do this yourself, it’s called EveryDay. It’s a simple but fun idea, the app reminds you to take a daily picture, and you line your face up on a grid, the longer you do it the better the end result. It’ll collect all your photos and then you can turn them into a movie just like the aforementioned famous one from Noah Kalina. Watch the preview video above to get an idea, near the end you’ll see how it turns out.

If this sounds fun to you, you can grab it from the App Store:

• Everyday – $1.99 (iTunes Store Link)

This is a great idea for an app that has captured a lot of peoples imaginations and it’s sure to be popular, it’s already been mentioned by several prominent tech blogs including TechCrunch and DaringFireball. This is the apps simple GUI:
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Mac users can often reclaim significant disk space by clearing out their Downloads folder.

Just how significant depends on the user, what they download, and if they tend to that directory often, but… See that screenshot? That’s my Macs Downloads folder measuring in at a whopping 26.18GB and begging for deletion. I’m a pretty savvy individual but I’ve somehow neglected to periodically delete the contents of ~/Downloads and it grew to include over 7,000 files and consume 10% of my overall disk space.

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Prepare for a new addiction: Angry Birds Rio is available to download for Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The sequel to Angry Birds brings 60 new levels and is bound to be just as highly addictive and fun, so now is a good time to start setting aside some mandatory procrastination gaming time.

Download Angry Birds Rio from the App Stores

• Angry Birds Rio for Mac (Mac App Store)
• Angry Birds Rio for iPhone (iTunes Store Link)
• Angry Birds Rio HD for iPad (iTunes Store Link

The game is $4.99 on the Mac App Store, $2.99 for iPad, and $0.99 for iPhone & iPod touch. There are new characters and new level designs, as you can see in the screenshots:
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Generally speaking, if you kill the Mac OS X Finder it will automatically restart itself as it should. We say “generally” because from time to time things don’t go exactly as planned, and on rare occasions the Finder won’t reopen itself after being killed, restarted, or manually quit.

When the Finder doesn’t auto relaunch itself after being quit or restarted, you can manually force it to launch by using the Terminal. Because the Finder is basically an application, this forces it to open again, or re-open is perhaps more accurate.

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LetterBox is a very popular plugin for Mac OS X Mail.app that gives you a nice widescreen interface. Unfortunately it seems like every other Mac OS X system update screws up LetterBox compatibility, and 10.6.7 is no different. Thankfully the LetterBox developer is quick to react, and a fixed version for Mac OS X 10.6.7 is out:

Download LetterBox for Mac OS X 10.6.7

• Get LetterBox fixed for 10.6.7 fix now (direct link to DMG file)

If you’d rather fix it yourself, you can do so using the existing version of LetterBox:

Manually Fix LetterBox for Mac OS X 10.6.7:
This is a bit more advanced than just downloading the new plugin, but you can follow the instructions to fix LetterBox for 10.6.5 and then add the following UUID’s:

9049EF7D-5873-4F54-A447-51D722009310
1C58722D-AFBD-464E-81BB-0E05C108BE06

Thanks to Vincent for 10.6.7 UUID fix!

A Macs startup drive can be changed during system boot by holding down the OPTION key, start holding down Option the moment you hear the boot chime sound and while the screen is still black, this will bring up the boot drive manager.

From this startup boot disk menu, you can use the mouse or the arrow keys to select the drive or partition to boot from, and then either click or hit return to startup the Mac from the chosen boot volume.

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Mac OS X 10.6.7 is now available for all to download! If you aren’t automatically notified, launch Software Update to download and install the latest Snow Leopard update that includes bug fixes, security updates, and performance updates.

If you don’t want to use Software Update, you can also download the 10.6.7 updater .dmg files directly from Apple as either the standard updater or a combo update

Mac OS X 10.6.7 Direct Download Links

These are direct download links to DMG files hosted by Apple:

• Mac OS X 10.6.7 Update (475 MB)
• Mac OS X 10.6.7 Combo Update (1.12 GB)

The easiest method for most users to install is using Software Update.

Here are the full release notes for 10.6.7:

This update is recommended for all versions of Mac OS X v10.6 through 10.6.6 Snow Leopard, and includes general operating system fixes that enhance the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac; including fixes that:

Improve the reliability of Back to My Mac.

Resolve an issue when transferring files to certain SMB servers.

Address various minor Mac App Store issues.

Additional improvements

Includes all the improvements in the previous Mac OS X v10.6.1, 10.6.2, 10.6.3, 10.6.4, 10.6.5, and 10.6.6 updates.

Includes Safari 5.0.4.

Includes RAW image compatibility for additional digital cameras.

For information about the security content of this update, please visit article HT1222.

Resolves a window resizing issue with X-Plane 9 on Macs with ATI graphics

Addresses an issue with MacBook Air (Mid 2010) computers that could cause a kernel panic.

Address issues in the AirPort driver for certain devices.

Improves brightness on external displays and projectors.

Addresses an issue where DVD Player may display black video on some Macs using the 64-bit kernel.

Addresses an issue with some NEC displays in which the screen may appear black when connected to a Mac Pro (Mid 2010).

Resolves an issue in which some Multiple Master (MM) fonts were missing from Mac Pro (Mid 2010), MacBook Pro (15-inch & 17-inch Mid 2010), and iMac (Mid 2010) computers.

Addresses various issues with MacBook Air (Mid 2010) computer performance.

Resolves an issue in which clicking the Updates tab in the Mac App Store could cause the Mac App Store to become unresponsive.

Fixes a problem opening an afp:// URL that points to a file, and changes the AFP mount path to conform to previous Mac OS X releases. For details, see article HT4538.

Includes the ability to repair certain issues that may prevent hardware RAID volumes from mounting. For more information, see article TS3631.

Fixes a rare issue in Mac OS X v10.6.5 that could cause user accounts to disappear from the Login window and System Preferences after putting the system to sleep.

Improves the reliability of dragging files or folders to the Trash when using an NFS home directory.

If we find anything interesting that isn’t listed, we’ll let you know.

Mac OS X 10.6.7 edges closer to the next major revision of Mac OS X, 10.7 Lion, which is due for release this summer.

For security reasons, it’s always a good idea to lock your Mac screen when you step away from the keyboard. On the other hand, there are times where you’ll be away from your Mac but you don’t want to have to re-enter your password to login, or you just don’t want your screensaver activating or your Mac sleeping.

Here’s three ways to temporarily prevent Mac OS X from sleeping or activating the screensaver:

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If you’ve ever needed to reboot in the middle of an iChat conversation you know how distracting it can be to your train of thought, plus it’s also a huge interruption to the flow of conversation.

An easy solution to this is to set iChat to keep track of your last messages:
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The default iOS water droplets wallpaper is beautiful, but it doesn’t easily stretch to a desktop resolution. No big deal, some crafty Photoshop work from DeviantArt has created this massive 2560×1440 version that closely resembles the default background on new iPhones and iPads.

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What do Star Wars Legos, an iPhone, and Steve Jobs have in common? Absolutely nothing outside of this picture. I have no idea where this is from or what the context is, but this is just one of many goofy things that end up in our inbox. Thanks for the submission Andy!

Oh and if you’re suddenly on a Star Wars kick, you can watch “Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope” entirely in ASCII using the command line (nerd alert).

Want a world class education on iPhone and iOS development? Check out Stanford Universities iOS & iPhone Development course CS193p, the class has been taught several times now and each one has been uploaded to iTunes as a free video podcast. In addition to the free video lessons, you also get complete access to all class slides, tutorials, and assignments.

The classes assume you have some experience with development concepts and Object Oriented Programming, although the first lesson does a quick overview of object oriented principles and vocabulary. If you’re totally new to programming, you might want to grab a beginners book before jumping into the Stanford lessons.

iTunes: iPhone Application Development – Winter 2010

iTunes: Developing Apps for iOS – Fall 2010

Stanford: Assignment & lectures for Winter 2010

Stanford: Assignment & lecture slides for Fall 2010

The classes require you to have Xcode installed, which you can either install Xcode 3 from an existing Mac OS X 10.6 installation DVD and then install the iOS SDK, or you can get Xcode 4 from the Mac App Store for $5. Registered iOS developers can always download Xcode 4 for free as part of their membership.

FWIW, tuition at Stanford University starts at a whopping $38,000 a year, so being able to watch their courses online is a pretty great deal.

A MacBook Pro 15″ with an Apple Cinema 20″ Display is a classic setup where you can’t go wrong. The fisheye lens distorts things a bit, but it still looks great.
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When was the last time an operating system update gave you more battery life? I can’t remember that ever happening, but here I am running the dev preview of Mac OS X Lion and I have longer battery life than I do running another OS.

I can’t vouch for all Macs, but on my MacBook Air 11.6″ base model with the screen brightness set to half and running Mac OS X 10.7 Lion it’s squeezing out 8 hours of battery life with 91% charge remaining. That is about an hour longer than Apples suggested max battery life on the 11.6″ Air, and nearly 3 hours longer than I get in 10.6 Snow Leopard under similar usage conditions.

It was just last week that I took a screenshot of battery life in this menubar tip. This is the same MacBook Air, same brightness settings, same apps open, the only difference is Mac OS X 10.6.6, where it shows 5 hours of battery remaining at a 95% charge:

Is this just a fluke? Maybe Lion calculates remaining battery life differently, or maybe there is a fundamental change in how Mac OS X Lion manages power? I don’t have an answer, but my anecdotal evidence shows that I get significantly more battery life out of Lion Developer Preview than I do in Snow Leopard. I’ve continued to test this and even after increasing machine activity, CPU load, and screen brightness, the MacBook Air continues to show the same results.

The more I use the developer preview, the more I like it. If you’re a developer and you haven’t used it yet, install Lion on another partition and dual boot your Mac, there isn’t much to lose. For the rest of you, you can either register for the developer program and pay $99 for access, or you can just wait until Summer for the release and watch this 16 minute Mac OS X 10.7 video walkthrough in the meantime to get a good feel for the new OS.

Mac OS X market share is growing nicely around the world with some pretty impressive numbers in North America, Oceania, and parts of Europe.

As a continent, North America takes the cake at 14.09%, which isn’t too surprising considering it is the home of Apple. Next up is Oceania (Australia & New Zealand) at 13.71%. Europe as a whole is at a somewhat low 6%, but looking at specific countries gives a very different picture; Switzerland tops off everywhere in the world with a 17.61% Mac market share, followed by Luxembourg with 15.79%, Iceland at 15.18%, Norway with 12.14%, and Denmark’s 11.71%.
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Here’s one of the stranger tips I’ve seen to boost your iPhone reception; put it in a glass.

Yea, like a water glass. I can imagine a surge of funny pictures featuring people talking to water cups, but apparently for some people this actually works.

The tip was discovered by an author at TheNextWeb, who found that they had no reception in a dungeon-ish restaurant:

a few years ago one of the waitresses… discovered (how?) that if you put a phone in an empty glass it dramatically improves the reception. The Pasta e Basta restaurant is basically stuck in a concrete basement so reception has always been awful. But since they found out about this trick they at least have had enough reception to make and receive calls.

The waiter gave me glass, I put my iPhone in, reluctantly, and lo and behold: I got 3 bars and no 3G but some GPRS. Not perfect but a huge improvement from the ‘No signal’ message I got earlier.

Who would have guessed?

I decided to try it out myself. I have AT&T and live in one of those famous reception dark spots, so it’s pretty easy for me to find a place where the iPhone has no reception. I put the iPhone in a glass and… still no service. Just for fun I went to a place where I usually have a few bars and it did increase one bar of reception, but I get the same effect from setting the iPhone on a table and just not holding the iPhone at all. Not too impressive. The next step was to beat the dead horse, so naturally I took this a step further and tried to make a phone call with the iPhone in a glass. Big surprise, it’s a terrible experience. You can’t talk normally (hint: there’s a reason phones aren’t made to resemble a water glass) so I put the iPhone on speaker mode instead, this caused the calls recipient to hear themselves talk in a super annoying echo chamber.

No dice for me, but maybe it’ll work in a bind for you.

Oh, but it does make the iPhone speaker phone sound a lot louder, as the sound projects from the water glass. So I guess there’s that!

AT&T is beginning to crack down on unofficial iPhone tethering methods, including users of MyWi, the unofficial iPhone WiFi hotspot app that is popular among jailbreakers.

Customers are being notified that their service plans need updating to subscribe to a tethering plan, and that they will be automatically subscribed to a DataPro 4GB package that costs an additional $45 per month if they continue to tether. In the email, AT&T also notes that if customers discontinue the use of tethering, no changes will be made to their plan.

Here is the full letter that AT&T is sending to select iPhone customers who are suspected of using unofficial tethering methods:
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