Four Easy-to-Miss iOS 6 Improvements

    Not every new iOS feature gets its fair share of time in the spotlight. We may be focusing on Siri and Maps when it comes to Apple's next mobile operating system, but the update promises a number of smaller changes that are each impressive in their own way. Here are some iOS enhancements that you might have overlooked during Apple's iOS sneak peek at WWDC back in June.

New Share Screen In iOS 5, when you tap to share a photo, you get a long list of sharing actions to choose from — posting to Twitter, sending an email or iMessage, and other options. iOS 6 adds Facebook sharing as an option — part of the systemwide Facebook integration planned for this update, along with sharing to various Chinese social networks. (That's a nod to how important the Chinese market has become to Apple.) But the company has decided against cramming more buttons into that panel. Instead, iOS 6 will present you with a new icon-based sharing screen. It uses these icons to represent the apps and services with which you can share your content.

Spotlight Tweak If you have lots of apps, sometimes it's hard to figure out precisely which home screen they're located on. In iOS 6, Spotlight makes that a smidgen easier by listing the name of the folder in which a particular app is nestled when it appears in the search results.

Reminders Improvements Apple introduced the Reminders app in iOS 5, and it gets some helpful new options in iOS 6. Apple says you can now set location-based reminders from the iPad. Even better, you can manually enter.

Time to Share iOS 6's sharing screen offers an icon-based view — not unlike the iPhone's home screen — in contrast with the list-based approach of iOS 5. addresses where you want reminders, a feature currently missing from Reminders; at present, you can only set reminders for locations linked to addresses in your existing contacts.

Also new in Reminders is the ability to reorder your tasks as desired. And Apple told developers that iOS 6 includes a new Reminders API, which should make it possible for

third-party apps to integrate with the Reminders database. That means you can use Siri to set reminders, which will in turn appear in your third-party task-management app of choice.

Siri and Twitter We mentioned this in Sit-i's New Tricks (see page 23) but it bears repeating: if you link your friends' Twitter usernames to their Contacts entries, Siri automatically translates their real names into their Twitter handles as you dictate.

So if I say, "Tweet 'Excellent dinner last night with Jason Snell, Dan Moren, and Serenity Caldwell," Siri automatically composes a tweet like "Excellent dinner last night with @jsnell, @dmoren, and @settern."

- LEX FRIEDMAN