Apple has announced a restructuring of its executive lineup today. Craig Federighi and Dan Riccio have both been promoted to the level of senior vice president.

Bob Mansfield, who had planned to retire back in June, will remain at Apple and report directly to Tim Cook and work on “future products.” Mansfield has been an instrumental part of Apple’s success since he joined the company in 1999. He has led the hardware engineering for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac since 2005.

Tapbots, the company behind Tweetbot for iOS and Mac, has announced that the Tweetbot for Mac Alpha is no longer available as a public download. Tweetbot for Mac has been gearing up to enter the public beta stage before its official release in the Mac App Store, but Twitter’s new restrictions have forced Tapbots to remove the download link for the Tweetbot for Mac Alpha.

Several updates have been pushed out to Mac users running Tweetbot since Tapbots released the alpha on July 11th. Existing users can keep using the app, but everyone else will be left out in the cold until the app goes on sale in the Mac App Store.

Over the weekend I noticed that the Tweetbot for Mac Alpha was no longer working on the Tapbots website, and today’s news reveals the reason.

This weekend saw Palo Alto, California once again hosting its annual Festival of the Arts. The festival is known, amongst other things, for its yearly Italian Street Painting Expo, in which over sixty street artists take to the pavement to make elaborate paintings in chalk.

This year, to honor Palo Alto’s most famous adopted son, street artist Lawrence Viariseo did this amazing technicolor Steve Jobs portrait. Steve looks, perhaps, a little bit leonine in the painting, but that just makes it better: Apple’s founder always did have a thing for lions.

Check out the Vlariseo drawing the portrait below, courtesy of Flickr user Tim Roper. It’s a thing of beauty.

Reader James G writes,

I use the iPad’s locking feature requiring a 4-digit pin. The problem I was worried about is that the default setting has a button allowing you to see photos without knowing the 4-digit pin.

With the dozens of login names & passwords I’m required to remember, I often take a screenshot whenever I’ve created a new login or changed my password. So some of my “photos” are part of what I want to protect. Until recently I hadn’t realized that by default the pin didn’t block looking at the pictures.

I had looked and not found a way to turn that off, but after writing to you discovered there is a way to do it.

So, as James found out, there is, in fact, a way to keep your photos private when using the passcode security on an iPad, but you have to disable the default slideshow option first.

What do you do if you’re a medical technology startup while waiting for the FDA to approve your flagship iPhone-based product?

If you’re AliveCor, you launch a veterinary version of it.

The product in question is AliveCor’s iPhone ECG heart monitor, which the company showed off nearly two years ago, at the CES in 2011. The device allows a medical professional to assess a patient’s heart rhythm, providing more data than a stethoscope or manual check of their pulse. Although the device has broad potential, it has yet to be approved by the FDA.

When people think computer gaming, they may not think Macintosh right away. However, there are a host of games both new and old, expensive and cheap, indie and triple-A for the Macintosh platform. The following list, then, is of the best strategy games the Mac platform has to offer; all of these received an over 80 score on Metacritic, a gaming review aggregation site. Most of them are playable on modern Macs, with a few exceptions as noted.

Apple just won their trial against Samsung on Friday, but they aren’t wasting any time listing the Samsung products that they will seek to have banned in the US. It looks like Apple is only going after eight phones, including the popular Galaxy S II.

Here are all the phones currently on the list:

Apple just laid a royal beat down on Samsung in the U.S. court system over patent infringement. You’d easily think that the two companies are huge enemies that would gladly rip out each other’s hearts and drive over them with a steamroller.

Truth is, even though they’re enemies in the smartphone market, Apple needs Samsung’s components to build iPhones and iPads, and Samsung needs Apple to keep buying their parts to make money. Samsung products comprise 26 percent of the component cost of the iPhone, so to keep their smartphone and component manufacturing businesses separate, Samsung has created a strict ‘Internal Firewall’ to try to avoid conflicts.

Every morning, I scrape myself off of the bottom of my hangover’s hobnailed boot and try to make it down to the gym. About two-out-of-five times, I’ll oogily succeed and manage to douse myself in the pool until I’ve either done fifty laps or turned the water fifty proof, whichever comes first.

If only there was a way to be better motivated, I’ll often think to myself. Which is why I’m intrigued by a partnership between GymPack and RunKeeper, that will not only award me real money when I successfully drag my carcass to the gym, and actually penalize me money when I don’t.

There are a ton of ways to get fit and lose weight. And there are even more stupid books and fad diets that may or may not help you to slim down and get healthier. But there are really only two things you need to do: eat less and do more.

Of course, it isn’t easy. Luckily, those of a certain nerdy bent will find all the motivation they need in gadgets and apps. I have been doing just that for the past few months, and I thought I’d write a little about how to get thinner and fitter by using your iPhone.

Almost all of your friends probably own smartphones by now. If they don’t own an iPhone they probably have an Android phone, which is fine because it seems like everyone nowdays could use a personal computer in their pocket.

Smartphone adaption rates have been ridiculously high in the US and other companies over the past five-years. Flurry, a mobile application analytics company, decided they wanted to know just how fast iOS and Android devices are growing, so they compiled some data and found that the smartphone revolution is bigger than any other digital revolution in history.

We’ve already seen Tim Cook’s memo to Apple employees following the company’s landmark victory over Samsung last Friday. As expected, Samsung’s isn’t quite as upbeat or as celebratory. Released today, the Korean company’s announcement insists that it tried to settle with Apple out of court, but that Apple “pressed on with a lawsuit.” It also notes that the verdict “starkly contrasts” those recently made by courts in a number of other countries.

While bring your own device (BYOD) programs that encourage employees to use their personal iPhones, iPads, and other devices in the office increases productivity and employee satisfaction, the trend is also turning those employees into workaholics. That’s not entirely a new realization – we’ve covered the potential impact of the BYOD trend on the work/life balance before (including a recent study that showed that BYOD programs actually improve that balance for IT professionals).

The latest research on BYOD’s impact on workers shows two additional insights – a significant number of employees are footing the bill (sometimes a very big bill)  for mobile data service while on the road for work.

You’re probably going to see a lot of stories like this in the coming weeks. Apple stock opened at a record $680 a share this morning, on the first day of trading following the Cupertino company’s massive victory over Samsung on Friday. This surpasses its previous record of $674.88 a share, which was hit last Tuesday, August 21, and it pushes Apple’s market capitalization to a new high of $637 billion.

Got a spare five minutes? Want to do something fun. Then take a quick look at Gutenberg Variations, a free iPhone app which takes your typed text and turns it onto sheet music. And then plays it.

By now we’ve all had chance to digest Apple’s landslide victory over Samsung last Friday, which saw the Cupertino company awarded just over $1 billion in damages. Both companies gave their own thoughts on the verdict with press releases shortly after it was announced, but the effects of this case will be felt by more than just Apple and Samsung.

As the creator of Android — the operating system that powers Samsung’s offending devices — you’d think that Google would have some concerns that the verdict will affect its own software. However, the company maintains that the claims involved “don’t relate to the core Android operating system.”

Here’s an interesting theory from Macotakara, riffing on photos highlighted by Apple.pro last week: the square chip seen at the top of the next iPhone, to the right of the built-in iSight camera, could be an NFC chip. In fact, it looks exactly the same size as one.

Evernote’s Smart Notebook might cost $25 – double the price of the almost identical 3.5 x 5.5-inch Moleskine version – but it will likely sell by the pallet-load. Why? Because it is a genuine paper Moleskine which integrates with Evernote itself.

The Smart Notebook has special paper which – in combination with a new update to the Evernote iOS app – makes scanning and tagging easier than ever.

Built into every Mac are a host of accessibility options. People with visual disabilities may need to zoom into the screen, making everything on it bigger in order to see enough to use the Mac. Individuals who experience blindness can use VoiceOver, which has the Mac speak everything on screen, including menus and dialog buttons. Other people with visual impairments may need to invert the Display colors and adjust the contrast to help them with eye fatigue as well as seeing the items on screen.

We may still have a couple weeks to wait before Tim Cook takes the stage to introduce the iPhone 5, but as we edge closer to the big day, Apple’s surprises are quickly being spoiled. We’ve already seen almost every component that will end up inside the device — including its display and back plate. And so it’s no surprise that we’re now seeing its packaging.

But unlike the other iPhone 5 leaks, we have a feeling this one’s nothing more than a good fake. In fact, there are a number of reasons why this isn’t the iPhone 5’s new packaging at all.

Apple has now caught up with demand of its 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro, with shipping estimates dropping to just 2-4 business days this morning. But if you’re holding out for the 13-inch model, your wait could soon be coming to an end. According to one analyst, 13-inch 2560 x 1600 Retina displays have now entered production ready for an October launch.

The Retina MacBook Pro is now shipping in just 2-4 business days from the Apple Online Store. This is the shortest shipping estimate the new notebook has seen since its introduction at WWDC back in June, and indicates Apple has now caught up with demand ahead of its iPhone 5 launch next month.

If you needed any more confirmation that the next iPhone is launching during the second half of September, look no further. Verizon has put a vacation blackout in place for its employees starting September 21st, and now TechCrunch is reporting that AT&T has the same blackout in place from September 21st to the 30th.

Apple is expected to announce the next iPhone on September 12th with pre-orders beginning on the same day. In-store availability would then begin the next Friday, September 21st.

Here at Cult of Mac, we love showing off what’s in our gadget bags. It’s like a ritual: first to meticulously pack your bag with all the gear you could possibly need to get through the day, but then to empty it out, arrange it neatly and present it for the scrutiny and admiration of your fellow computer geeks.

We love seeing what’s in people’s gadget bags, so we’re throwing a contest in partnership with one of our favorite bag makers, Waterfield Designs: show us what’s in your current gadget bag and if you impress us, you could win one of three amazing new gadget bags and sleeves for your Mac, iPhone and iPad!

Here’s how to enter Cult of Mac’s “What’s In My Gadget Bag?” contest!