While I think managing and playing tunes on your iPhone is not as good as doing so on the classic iPod, there are a few advantages with the iPhone and other iOS devices that you might not be aware of. The storage space on a typical iPhone is not large enough for say a 40+ GB iTunes library collection, so you definitely need to manage playlists on your iPhone.

If browsing the web is one of the top three things you do on your computer everyday, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with as many time saving and clutter free features as you can. While there are several features I would like to see added to Safari, it’s still my default web browser of choice because of its speed and connectivity to my other Apple devices.

If you’re looking for yet another place to stash photos, documents, videos, and other media online, the phone carrier AT&T is providing 5GB of storage space for its customers. AT&T Locker is a multi-platform cloud storage space that works similarly to other cloud storage spaces like Dropbox, Google Drive, and Sugar Sync, allowing users to upload, archive, and share files over social networks and email. The Locker was launched on Android earlier this year and now comes to the iOS.

On the eve of the iPad mini release, Apple released an iOS 6.0.1 software update, followed by another set of updates for iPhoto, Aperture, and Safari. While these updates include numerous bug fixes and stability improvements, they also add a few enhancement features and security patches.

The recently announced iPad mini, along with similar digital tablets like the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7 make for nearly perfect e-reading devices. From the near paper-like reading to the easy download and archiving of eBooks, there’s hardly no reason now not to build an eBook library. As this infographic points out, e-reading is on the rise and it’s becoming easier to start an e-library.

If you think the Siri search feature on the iPhone is pretty cool and convenient, you might find it a little slow and clumsy after testing out the updated version of the iOS Google Search app, released on Tuesday. Google Search goes beyond the web browser search feature in iOS Safari by allowing users to make voice and text activated queries, as well as searches based on a snapped photo.

I use my iPhone several times a day for various purposes, so any way I can find to do less tapping and execute actions in a few less steps is important to my day-to-day workflow and productivity. Apple doesn’t allow third-party developers much room for automation and shortcut actions on its iOS devices, but Application Cubby’s Launch Center Pro helps you build app launch actions that can save you some tapping and frustration.

Recently I wrote about several quirks or underdeveloped features in Apple’s latest Mountain Lion, and in this article I want to turn the focus onto the iOS for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Lots of features work very well in both OS X and iOS, but both systems are not perfect, and for those of us who rely on Apple products in our daily workflow invariably look for workarounds to underdeveloped or missing features.

The best way to learn music is probably to learn how to play a real instrument, but if you’re like me and you don’t have the time, Apple’s popular song-producing application, GarageBand, can be useful for both the musically and non-musically inclined to have fun with music. I’m of the latter group – I know little of nothing about producing music. But when I find the time, I sometimes open GarageBand and play around with it.

As part of its much-anticipated iPad mini release event on Tuesday, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook also demonstrated the update of the iOS iBooks app and version 2 of the multimedia and publishing application, iBooks Author. Cook noted that more than 400 million iBooks have been downloaded since the release of the iOS iBooks reader.

In the age of the Internet, RSS feeds, and informative MUO articles, there’s very little time these days to read actual newspapers and even watch say CNN. But keeping up with local, national, and world news is still important for many reasons, and a new iPhone app called Circa may be the minimalist solution to your consumption of news. Circa is about managing and following the news stories you’re interested in.

Apple unveiled Fusion Drive during the presentation of the new Mac products and upgrades. Fusion Drive is an optional feature that merges a 128GB flash drive (SSD) with a 1TB or 3TB hard drive — both into a single volume. It can be purchased as part of the new Macs, and in lieu of the traditional HDD or the latest Flash drives. The hybrid Fusion Drive will mean faster read and write performance for disk-intensive tasks and applications.

Shortcat, which is in alpha stage of development, enables you to keep your hands on your keyboard and navigate to any part of an application, webpage, or even System Preferences controls. Using a few keyboard shortcuts to activate Shortcat will cause what are called “accessibility attributes” to be highlighted. From there you use the keyboard to activate any highlighted element.

I’m not an Apple fanboy, and typically I don’t complain about Apple hardware or software, because usually Apple’s products meet and exceed my expectations. However, I do sometimes shake my head in wonder about some of the obvious quirks that Apple knows exist or overlooks. I wonder what Apple developers were thinking when they built or revised some features. Below I list my top quirks, found in Mountain Lion.

Twitter has just announced that it’s hosting a Fiction Festival, that will run five days, starting November 28 through to December 2nd. Twitter is calling the Fiction Festival a virtual storytelling celebration opened to creative storytellers from around the world who submit ideas for a story. Ideas for the Twitter Festival include short stories in the form of tweets, Twitter chats, live-tweeting, or an original project. The proposal, Twitter says, must fit into the time window of the five day festival, or it can run as short as an hour.