Hasta La Gadget!

Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior VP of Mac software engineering, developed the Mac OS X operating system. Photo courtesy Apple.

Apple announced Wednesday that Bertrand Serlet, lead developer of Mac OS X, is leaving the company, just a day before the operating system turns 10 years old.

Though less publicized than Apple executives Steve Jobs and Tim Cook, Serlet is a legend at the company. He was basically the Jony Ive of Apple’s software design. Mac OS X, which originally released March 24, 2001, has played a crucial role in driving the success of Apple’s Macs and mobile products.

“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,” said Serlet, Apple’s senior VP of software engineering, in a press statement. “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.”

Serlet has a lot to brag about. His baby, Mac OS X, not only powers Apple’s Mac computers, but also the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch — all blockbuster products.

After Apple fired Jobs in a power struggle in 1985, the exiled CEO founded NeXT to build a Mac-like computer for education that would put Apple out of business. Serlet, a former Xerox PARC employee, was on the NeXT team.

Then when Apple nearly went bankrupt in 1996, the company acquired NeXT to build a new Mac OS. That brought both Jobs and Serlet on board at Apple, and the two have been working together for 22 years.

When Mac OS X debuted in 2001, it had a somewhat rocky start: Many features were missing, and there were some compatibility problems with external hardware. Over the past decade, Apple pruned out OS X’s issues and polished the OS. Apple released iOS in 2007. It’s a specialized version of Mac OS X for the iPhone, and later the iPod Touch and iPad.

The next version of Mac OS X, dubbed Mac OS X Lion, is due for release sometime 2011.

A screen shot of part of the page you would see when visiting amazon.com/apps before it was taken down. Photo: androidnews.de

Retail giant Amazon is preparing to launch its own app store on the Android platform on Tuesday, March 22, a trusted source told Wired.com.

First leaked in September, Amazon’s Android app store will be a curated market, meaning Amazon reviewers will determine which apps are allowed inside, similar to Apple’s iTunes App Store. That’s a contrast to Google’s “anything goes” policy for apps that appear in the Android Marketplace.

Amazon has been less than discreet with its imminent app store. Earlier this week, an Android fan discovered that a webpage for the Amazon app store —http://www.amazon.com/apps — went live prematurely, revealing a horizontal sliding menu of about 48 apps and their prices.

Customers will be able to purchase apps through the Amazon.com website or directly through a native Amazon app on their Android devices, said our tipster, who is involved in the launch. Our source asked to remain anonymous due to a non-disclosure agreement.

For apps that have links to purchase and download other apps, those links must go through the Amazon market. They may not contain URLs to apps on the Android market, our source added.

An Amazon app store is possible on Android because, unlike Apple, Google allows third parties to set up their own software shops on the Android platform. Some critics point out that an Amazon app store in addition to an official Android app market may create confusion on the platform.

However, it’s worth noting that Amazon payment systems are deployed in more countries than Google Checkout, so an Amazon app store may pose serious competition to the Android Marketplace, and possibly even iTunes.

TechCrunch has speculated that the Amazon app store may precede an Amazon-made tablet powered by the Android OS, enabling Amazon to more directly compete with Apple and other tablet manufacturers.

Multiple reports claim that Amazon will focus on lower prices for apps to gain a competitive edge. Indeed, tech blog Android News looked through the 48 apps on the leaked webpage and found that prices of a few apps undercut the prices for the same respective apps listed on Google’s Marketplace.

See Also:

• Amazon Android App Store Apps and Prices Get Early Reveal
• Amazon to Launch Android App Store
• Everything We Know So Far About Amazon’s Android App Store …

Instapaper 3 makes a good app better

Instapaper, one of the best apps on any mobile device, has just been updated to v3.0 in time for you to enjoy on your new iPad 2. There are some big new features, but if you want to go right along and continue reading articles you saved earlier, then you can carry on as if nothing had changed.

And if you never used Instapaper, here’s a refresher: You click a bookmarklet whenever you see a web article you’d like to read later. Fire up Instapaper — later — and you’ll find all the articles saved and beautifully formatted for easy reading.

The biggest new feature is social integration (no, don’t groan — developer Marco Arment has got this just right). The button to “star” favorite articles has been replaced by a “Like” button, and your friends can browse and read these articles.

Friends come from the usual places — Facebook, Twitter, your contacts list, Tumblr (Arment was a founder and the developer of Tumblr), and also Pinboard and Evernote. Once you have added friends you can click to browse a list of their liked articles. It actually works really well, and is a lot better than the previous system, where you had to subscribe to another Instapaper user’s email address. In fact, so hidden was this feature that you likely didn’t even know it existed.

Next up are editor’s picks. This section gathers various long-form journalism aggregators: Give Me Something to Read, Longreads, The Browser and Longform.org. Tap one of these and you are taken to the relevant website (using the new, redesigned built-in browser) from where you can pick what you want to read, whether now or later.

There are lots of other less noticeable updates, too. Better image quality for stored pictures, full search of downloaded articles (great for research) and what Marco calls a “smart rotation lock,” which pops up a button to switch on rotation-lock if it thinks you have tipped your iDevice too far by accident. This is fantastic for people who prefer to use the iPad’s toggl-switch for muting, not rotation lock, and is one of those tiny, smart touches with which Marco peppers his software.

It’s a solid upgrade, and free. And if you don’t use Instapaper already, shame on you — it only costs $5.

Instapaper 3.0 is here! [Instapaper Blog]

See Also:

• Instapaper: A $5 App That Justifies Your iPhone Purchase
• Preview: Instapaper Pro for iPad
• New Version of Instapaper Knows When It's Nighttime
• Instapaper Update Adds Pagination, Dictionary and Browser

Essay rich text editor for iPad adds some clever keyboard shortcuts

Essay, the only rich text editor on the iPad, has gotten a pretty big update. You may remember our first look at the app back in January, when we found it to be good-looking, easy to use and very nicely designed. It also lacked many external keyboard shortcuts, which made it all but useless for its intended purpose.

That problem has been fixed, in a rather clever way.

The reason there are so many plain text editors in the app store is because plain text support is built in to iOS. If you write an app, text-editing comes free. This is not so with rich text, which meant that the developer, Dirk Holtwick, had to do the hard work himself. Further, shortcuts like control-b for bold and control-i for italics don’t work in iOS, so Dirk had to come up with something else. Here’s how it works:

If you hit alt-space, a little box pops up waiting for your command. Hit “i” for italics, “b” for bold, “u” for underline and so on. You can also toggle full-screen mode, switch zoom levels and change to paragraph, header and block-quote text.

It works surprisingly well, and if you’re used to a desktop app launcher like Quicksilver or LaunchBar, then you’re halfway there already.

V1.2 of Essay also adds undo and redo support, and enables auto-correction. Auto-correction is nice, but undo is essential, especially when you just selected an entire paragraph and accidentally overtyped it.

The app still has the same Dropbox support, handles markdown, TXT and HTML files and uses gestures to control the interface, and costs the same $4. Check it out.

Essay [iTunes]

Essay 1.2 with Keyboard Shortcuts [Essay blog]

See Also:

• Essay: iPad Rich Text Editor Shows Promise, Needs Work
• Elements for iPad, a Dropbox-Syncing Text Editor
• PlainText: iPad Text-Editor from the Makers of WriteRoom

FX Photo Studio HD is a big update to MacPhun’s already capable iPad photo-editing application. There are roughly one gazillion photo-processing apps in the store, but FX stands out for two reasons. First, it is very easy to use, and second, it comes packed with great effects.

The app works like many others: You choose an image from your photo album and then flip through menus to enhance or destroy it. FX wins here, as it is fast, both in loading and in previewing the effects.

About those effects: There are 181 separate things you can do. Some effects are variations (there are a few different vignettes, for example, and some filters are simply color variations on a theme). And some are plain tacky.

But nearly all of these filters are worth trying, from “Stencil Poster Red” seen in my screen-grab above, through various lo-fi Lomoesque color shifts to blurs, tilt-shifts and even underlying paper textures. If I had had this back when I was a graphic designer, it would have let me get a lot more work done from the bar.

There are also basic editing tools: Hidden within the filters you will find brightness, contrast and other adjustments. Effects can be tried one-by-one, and they replace each other. Press “Apply” and the change is baked in (you can still undo). Then any new effect is overlaid, making the possibilities endless.

The usual sharing options are here: Facebook, Flickr, Tumbler and Twitter, plus e-mail and save to photo album. There is also an in-app “documents” folder to keep things you don’t need elsewhere.

The level of polish is high. Not only can you reorder the effects lists, you can make a list of favorites, and all the UI transitions are smooth, fast fades.

One very neat feature is the ability to share a preset. First, you save your multi-effect preset, and then you opt to share it. Hit the share button and the preset settings are uploaded. You can then share the code by Twitter, Facebook, e-mail or the clipboard. And if somebody else sends you a code, you can enter it, and apply the effect to your own photos.

For all-out image tweaking, Photogene is still my favorite, but the range and quality of effects in FX Photo Studio makes it well worth the $3 price tag. And it has one killer feature that, as far as I know, no other app contains: Amazing Facts. When you export an image, it takes a few seconds to render. The app throws up an Amazing Fact to read while you wait. For instance, did you know that in Australia, kids can’t buy cigarettes, but they are allowed to smoke them?

FX Photo Studio HD [iTunes]

FX Photo Studio HD [MacPhun. Thanks, Tyler!]

See Also:

• Photogene 2.0 for iPad: A Desktop Photo Editor on a Tablet
• Photoshop Crashes onto iPad
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos