What you would do is take one of your Apple IDs — the single username to manage all your Apple accounts — associate it with a single iTunes account and a credit card, and assign it to all of your iOS devices.  From here on out, you can continue to make all of your family’s purchases for all of their devices from that one iTunes account.

However, there’s one exception: iCloud. It may seem like you would want a separate iCloud account for each device because each iCloud account comes with a mere 5 GB of free storage.  This hardly seems enough to back up even one 64 GB iPhone 4S or iPad.  Each member of your family may own multiple Apple devices and want to have all of their data equally accessible from each device. But having a separate account for each device does not make much sense either.

So what can an Apple ID do?

Some of the confusion over how to handle multiple Apple IDs comes from not knowing exactly what is possible.  For instance, every Apple ID is not automatically enrolled with all of Apple’s services.  You can create your AppleID and enroll it in each Apple service individually as you need to.  You do this by logging into that service with your Apple ID.  Additionally, each device can utilize multiple Apple IDs at the same time.  Some of Apple’s services can be configured once per device, others multiple times per device.  For example, each device can only be backed up to one iCloud account whereas each device can have multiple iCloud email accounts configured.

It can be hard to figure out how to do this. Some Apple IDs are set in the device settings, other are set separately per an individual app setting.  The chart below illustrates how many Apple IDs you can have associated with each device, and where the ID associated with that service is configured:

We’ve narrowed down your options and here are some suggestions for best organizing your family’s devices and Apple accounts:

One iTunes Apple ID for apps and media

Using the chart above as a sort of Apple ID map, you can plan which services you want to use, and just how you want to configure them on each family member’s device.  To start, take one Apple ID and associate it with an iTunes account for all of the app and media purchases your family makes. This is the account that is linked to a credit card.  With each Apple device, the purchased apps, music, books, magazines, TV Shows and movies account will be accessible by all of the devices registered with this account.

Keep in mind that the rules are changing.  Whe the iPad first came out, it used to be that you could authorize up to five OS X computers with the same iTunes account.  And in turn each OS X computer could sync its locally stored library of purchased apps and media (via a USB cable) to an unlimited number of  iOS devices.  With Apple moving away from physical access, cable-based direct syncing and online music storage in the cloud through add on services like iTunes Match, the opportunity exists for more than a household of devices being configured to access a single iTunes account’s media files.

This now means that a single account that access its music via the cloud can only have up to 10 devices and computers combined.  Ten sounds like a lot for an individual, but not a family. Think of a family of four having a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad each.  That’s 12 computers and devices, not including any Apple TVs and additional iPods scattered throughout the house.

One primary iCloud Apple ID on each device

The Apple ID that you use to create your iTunes account does not need to have an iCloud account associated with it.  In fact you do not need an iCloud account in order to use your iOS or OS X device.  But to take full advantage of all of the iCloud based features of iOS 5 listed in the above chart, you will need an iCloud account.  For some of these features there can be only one iCloud setting per device.

When configuring your family’s Apple devices, these settings are part of each device’s primary iCloud account.  While each device can have multiple iCloud accounts associated with it, only one of these iCloud accounts can enable a select set of features.  These features include Bookmarks, Photo Stream, Documents & Data and Storage & Backup.

Unfortunately, since these features are configured only via the iCloud settings on the device, they must all be associated with the same iCloud account.  This fact is really disappointing since it would be nice to configure all of your family’s devices on one iCloud account for iCloud Backup, and a separate one for app-based Documents & Data.  This would allow a user to have to pay once for additional storage on that one shared family-sized backup iCloud account.

One Apple ID to keep track of all of your family’s devices

With your family’s iTunes purchases under control, and the core features of iCloud storage taken care of, there is one particular feature of iOS 5 that can be set separately from a device’s primary iCloud account.  When it comes to locating each of your family’s devices, do not rely solely on the Find My Friends app to locate their position.  Create a common family iCloud account and configure each device to use this account in the Mail, Contacts, Calendars settings.  In fact, you can even create this iCloud account without creating a new Apple email address.  This family iCloud account’s sole purpose will be to keep track of all of your Apple devices.

Configuring each device in such a manner does not interfere with the use of a different app, Find My Friends. You only need to have one account on the device enable the Find my iPhone service.  Then the Find My Friends app will use that enabled service to share your location with whatever account is used to log on with the app.  That means each family member can still individually manage who knows their whereabouts via the Find My Friends app.

Multiple secondary iCloud Apple IDs on each device

Most of the iOS features that require an iCloud account have been taken care of, except the ones that really matter most.  At this point you can decide if you want a me.com email address or not.  Each family member can create their own account (or accounts) for Mail, Contacts, Calendars, Reminders, and Notes.

When it comes to mail, not every third-party service out there supports all of these features.  Hotmail, for instance, will support Reminders, but not Notes.  Some Microsoft Exchange Servers will support Reminders, some Notes and some both Reminders and Notes.  If you happen to configure your Google Mail as an Exchange service, you will not get Reminders or Notes.  Yahoo on the other hand actually supports them all and AOL, well, just Notes.  So be sure to pick a mail provider that will support all of the services you need.

Several independent Apple IDs for everything else

So what’s left?  Quite a bit actually.  FaceTime, GameCenter, Messaging, HomeSharing and even the Apple Store app.  The default account used by each of these independent apps is the Apple ID configured to be used with the iTunes account on a particular device.  But you can use any Apple ID you like.

These apps support features that are independent from both the iTunes account as well as the iCloud account that are configured on the device.  They are managed separately, configured in separate settings and even stored in separate apps.  You can sign out of each of these particular features and sign back in using a different Apple ID.  And this will have no effect on the aforementioned iTunes and iCloud account settings on the device.

A good strategy

The idea here is that you can use multiple Apple IDs on each device, and at the same time each Apple ID does not need to be enrolled in every Apple product, feature and service.  Decide what products and services you want to use first and determine how each device will be used.  If you don’t, before you know it you could end up with a real rats nest of accounts.

Do consider using one master family account on all devices to manage iTunes purchases, and use that same shared account to track the location of all of your devices.  As an added bonus, you could use the calendar, contacts and reminders with this shared family iCloud account as well.  Once you have each device configured with these basics, let each family member decide which third-party email service they want.  This may well be the best strategy to employ, until Apple sees fit to enable multiple users per device.

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Rope’n'Fly 3 - From Dusk Till Dawn (Free, Universal)  is a side-scrolling physics game where the main character swings from building to building with little more than his own momentum to aid him.  With Rope ‘n’ Fly, you can begin to experience what it is like to fly through a metropolis as a Spiderman-like superhero.  Just keep in mind that unlike a superhero, your character will perish if you are not careful.

Dropping from the sky, you must decide which tower to toss your grappling hook into.  Throw your line too close to you and you may not generate the momentum required to jump to the next building.  By tilting your device, you can use the accelerometer and swing your character back and forth to gain the necessary momentum to throw them through the air from one building to the next.  To do this, you simply tap once on the screen to release the character from the rope, and tap again on a particular point on each building to place the rope exactly where you want it.  Throw the line too far away or too low to the ground and you may find yourself landing face first in the street.

There are three different game modes you can choose from.  In the 30- and 60-second modes, you see how far you can swing within the given time limit.  In the five- and 10-rope modes, you see how far you can swing when using only a limited number of ropes.  In the 500-, 1,000- and 2,000-meter modes, you are timed to see how fast you can swing from building to building for the given length.  Then there is a free play mode where you can swing at your leisure and use as many ropes as you like, so long as you don’t hit the ground.  With each challenge, your best score is ranked against your friends best scores on OpenFeint.

There are also three different difficulty modes: Easy, Normal and Hard.  What distinguishes one difficulty level from the next is building height and how far apart each is placed. The farther apart the buildings, the more momentum you need to jump between them.  The shorter the building, the less rope you can use to swing with.  To mix things up a bit, there are a variety of characters you can choose from, as well as rope styles.  The background can be configured to display as dawn, dusk, night or dynamic, which is where the scenery changes between all three lighting modes.

Gameplay is very smooth and the physics behind the swinging, tossing and flying feel realistic.  If this style of gameplay and the graphics are something you particularly enjoy, Djinnworks has a few other titles in the App Store like this one.  In Wingsuit Stickman for example, you fly through the air like Superman rather than swing from building to building like Spiderman.  Who knew that stickmen had such great aspirations?

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That’s bunk, according to Wired publisher Howard Mittman, who said in a recent interview that apps have proven “incredibly profitable” and touts the publication’s 165,000 tablet subscribers (65,000 of these are pure-digital subs). Mittman adds that Wired readers also spend a significant amount of time with the tablet version and that he “missed the memo” about the failure of apps.

So what’s going on? Is there something special about Wired, or have other publishers simply failed to execute correctly?

To understand, it’s useful to consider the key complaints set out by Technology Review’s Jason Pontin in his influential “Why Publishers Don’t like Apps” essay from early May, including:

• expensive developer costs
• difficulty quantifying subscribers
• an unnatural, walled garden reader experience.

Pontin also decried the vulturous 30 percent bite that Apple took from many sales, a figure that exceeded publishers’ own margins. He concluded that he would toss the apps and instead follow the Financial Times’ example by using HTML5 technology to provide an easy cross-platform reader experience. (The FT this week told pC2012 that it didn’t need a marketing boost from the iTunes Store.)

Wired’s Mittman, however, says that Pontin simply “chose one path that didn’t work out” and that “trail-blazing is not for everyone.” He believes that HTML5 will just be part of a “larger app experience” in which an app is a storefront or gateway for readers to have deeper interactions with publishing brands.

One upshot of this may be that publishers need to try harder to make apps work, but it’s also possible that unique factors make Wired an outlier. These include a techy readership combined with corporate and editorial support for a development team that has been building apps longer than most. Condé Nast, its deep-pocketed parent, may also be betting big in the hopes that Wired’s success can be replicated at its other publications.

Mittman’s bullish stance on apps may also be in keeping with Wired’s famous “Web is dead” cover of two years ago that described how browsers were being supplemented by other types of viewing platforms.

The proof will ultimately be in the revenue pudding, of course. Based on a $20-a-year subscription price, Wired is set to earn $1.3 million on its digital only subscribers (minus any Apple cut). This is hardly earth-shaking but, after just two years, it may be big enough to keep Condé Nast in the app game for the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, it seems likely other publishers will continue to join instead the “good enough revolution” (a Wired term, by the way) offered by HTML5.

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• In an SEC filing late Thursday, Apple disclosed that CEO Tim Cook has excluded himself from the $2.65 per share dividend coming to holders of Apple restricted stock units later this year. Reuters reports that it means he’s missing out on at least $75 million.
• More details about what exactly Cook was doing in Washington, D.C. earlier this month are beginning to trickle out. Fortune hears from Congressional insiders about the meet and greet between the Apple CEO, House Speaker John Boehner, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
• The Wall Street Journal talked to a bunch of analysts who think Apple will launch an iMac with a Retina display at WWDC next month.
• One uncertainty at Apple in the post-Jobs era is talent retention. So surely many breathed a sigh of relief when SVP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive told the BBC Thursday that he wants to stay at the company.
• You have to scroll a long way down the page, but The Verge has an amusing video comparing Siri and S Voice in the new Samsung Galaxy S III.

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In fact, Bump now has a coveted place on my smartphone home screens and not just for the original sharing feature. The team added a share to desktop feature for photos, and it’s stellar. To use it, you have to open a browser window to http://bu.mp — which I now have as a dedicated bookmark in my browsers. Then, using the mobile application, you choose what objects you want to move from phone to computer. Finally, you “bump” the phone with the space bar on your computer’s keyboard. BOOM! Bump transfers the files to the computer in a split second.

This type of technology is welcome because at this point, we really shouldn’t be attaching smartphones to computers via a USB or other cable for data transfer. Our pocketable computers have multiple connectivity methods built in so to transfer a photo from one place to another, for example, wireless is the way to go. And the key feature here is the simplistic interface and action to initiate the transfer. There’s no network configuration, no IP addresses, and no pairing numbers to enter. That’s important for those new to smartphones.

Welcome back to my phone, Bump; I’ve missed you!

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• A look back at mobile in Q1
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In February, we took a look at smaller changes in the pre-release version of OS X Mountain Lion that Mac developers are using. These changes are good indications of what we’ll see when the final version goes live sometime this summer. Apple has released two new previews since then with quite a few updates — some significant, some seriously minor, and some that have even undone changes since we last wrote about it.

Here’s what’s new:

General changes

• The App Store now supports automatic downloads, which is one of the things I’d hoped Apple would add. You can also go backward and forward in the App Store and Game Center with two fingers, the same as Safari. Notably, you still can’t do this in the Finder.
• There’s a new popover for choosing avatars, which is used in Game Center and the Users and Groups pane in System Preferences.
• You can no longer remove apps and stacks from the Dock by simply dragging them off. You have to do it by right-clicking, which I expect is going to draw the ire of many power users.
• Launchpad is no longer arranged alphabetically. The “Utilities” folder has also been renamed to “Others”.
• The linen background in Mission Control is slightly darker than in Lion.
• Font Book now has a full-screen mode and two smart folders in the sidebar for fixed-width fonts and monospaced fonts.
• The battery item in the menu bar has been simplified so that the only option is to show the percentage left or not. Showing time left has been removed.
• You can go from one stack to another in the Dock with one click. In Lion, clicking another stack with one already open just closes the current stack. (Updated: Sorry, this isn’t new to Mountain Lion. Turns out, it doesn’t work in Lion when your Dock is hidden — which mine was — but does when unhidden.)

Safari

• There’s a new button for iCloud tabs, which allows access to tabs on other devices.
• There’s a new page-loading animation, which you can see in this YouTube video.
• Web apps can send native notifications through Safari, as evidenced by the new Notification Center tab in Safari’s preferences.
• Reading List has a new look, with a more neutral background color and paper texture instead of linen. It also supports offline reading.
• When you download a file in Safari in Lion, the file flies into the downloads button. In Mountain Lion, it flies into the downloads stack in the Dock, and a progress indicator appears over the stack.
• Safari has a more “responsive” UI: when you resize a window past a certain point, buttons will be hidden to save space.
• There’s a new tab button next to the bookmarks bar when only one tab is open and the tab bar is hidden.

Notification Center

• There’s a new “do not disturb” mode, which disables notifications when active.
• The menu bar icon has a gray dot in the middle, rather than black. It also changes into a moon when do not disturb mode is on.
• There’s a new button in the lower-righthand corner that’ll take you to Notification Center’s preference pane in System Preferences.

System Preferences

• The General perefence pane has been simplified. The options for smooth scrolling and double-click to minimize are gone, with the latter being moved to the Dock preference pane. The three dropdowns for the number of recent items has been consolidated into one. The dropdown for choosing the sidebar icon size has been moved to the top section. Finally, there’s a new checkbox for “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.”
• The preferences for “tap to click” have been moved into the Trackpad pane and are enabled by default.
• The Mission Control pane now has the option to disable grouping windows by application, so all windows will be shown the same way.
• Time Machine’s pane has been updated slightly, with flatter buttons and a simpler explanation of what Time Machine does.

What do you think of the new changes? Tell us in the comments.

Header image via Flicker user sigsegv.

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Editor’s Choice is exactly what it sounds like, a pick of the best apps from the App Store team intended to highlight something they don’t want to get lost in the shuffle of the 600,000 apps for sale in the iOS App Store and the 10,000 in the Mac App Store. The debut choice for iOS apps is Facebook Camera, a high-profile new camera app for iPhone, and the game Extreme Skater. For Mac Apps, Cobook and Deus Ex Human Revolution were the picks.

The first Editor’s Choice picks in the Mac App Store

Making the App of the Week free for the first time — it was for Cut the Rope: Experiments — is, as many will note, something out of Amazon’s playbook. A free app each day is one way Amazon helps people discover new apps in its Android Appstore. Who knows if Apple will ever do it again. It could have been merely an experiment — but it does show Apple is keen to try new things to improve app discovery.

It’s slightly ironic to me that Facebook Camera was one of the first choices for this new feature, particularly because when I tried to search for it in the App Store on my iPhone yesterday after news of its availability hit, the store returned the wrong results. Instead of Facebook Camera, it kept giving me Camera Awesome, iVideo Camera and iUploader for Facebook. What does it say about App Store search if the hottest new item can’t even be found by people trying to search directly for it? There are more drastic measures that need to be taken than just surfacing a few cool apps.

It’s obviously not a secret to App Store shoppers — or app creators for that matter — that sifting through hundreds of thousands of apps is tough. That’s why Apple has continued to introduce categorization features meant to more easily surface quality apps across different genres. There’s already the carousel of picks up top, the “New and Noteworthy” and “What’s Hot” sections, in addition to the top paid and free app charts, in addition to curated lists like Games, Education, and a variety of starter kits.

But it’s also not a secret to Apple. It’s presumably what was behind its purchase of app discovery tool Chomp back in February, believed to be for $50 million.

Not that any of these challenges have prevented Apple and its developers from making money on them. Apple has seen more than 25 billion downloads from the iOS store alone since 2008. But making that process easier is always welcome.

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It appears Apple is working on some device with a screen size that is larger than today’s iPhone, yet smaller than an iPad.  Many of us have also been waiting in anticipation for what could very well be the next big thing in television.  But what if these stories are all related?

I have personally found the screen size of today’s iPhone to be too small for browsing television guides, Netflix movie listings and my own personal iTunes media library.  I may what to

read reviews, check out cast lists, and even review a trailer or two on my device before suggesting it to the rest of the family.  The size of the screen is much better on the iPad — that is until you try and take control of your home theatre system with it. It is simply too heavy and awkward to continuously use as a television remote.

But what if this new “in-between device” was more than just a content-browsing device or media playback controller? What if it is the manifestation of the “television” Apple has reportedly been working on?  There is actually some sound reasoning that the latest rumors regarding Apple’s purchasing displays in a new range of sizes would be best suited for a new way to interact with the next generation of television:

• Internet television without the wires. Getting away from set-top boxes, Apple is looking to re-define the way that we interact with the television set. Screen-based touch gestures is a given, audible Siri voice commands is doable and camera-interpreted motions may also be on their way.  But having the data entry point closer to one person lounging in a darkened viewing room makes more sense than placing such a control embedded inside a television all the way across the room for everyone to gesture or shout at.
• Closed platform helps control the market. Something else that is unique to Apple’s current Apple TV platform is that is it not open to developers. This can initially be a good thing for content providers, as it does not allow just anyone to create a new channel or media outlet.  At first, existing content providers would be given an opportunity to create and deliver content in a similar fashion as “apps” on the Apple TV are done today.  And why not open the platform to developers?  There just may be a new pre-packaged development API in the works.  Eventually this could evolve into a similar content packaging framework akin to Apple’s iAd Producer, Newsstand feature, iBook Author or even the same method used for creating an iTunes LP or podcast today.
• Exclusive list of supporting television vendors — at first. AirPlay for video is just too good to keep exclusively to yet another set-top box.  And like all new product announcements with Apple, there is typically a short list of early adopters that come on board. Similar to the way that AirPrint and AirPlay (audio) has been catching on with printer and speaker manufactures, AirPlay (video) could be adopted by more and more television manufactures. This would mean that this new Apple TV with a screen would not need to be tethered to an open HDMI port — it would stream content directly to the television using AirPlay, just like iOS devices do today through the Apple TV.
• Create new products rather than fragment existing ones. Since the Apple TV platform would continue to be closed to developers, this would actually help prevent fragmentation of the existing iOS platform and allow Apple to develop a completely different form factor for just the AppleTV.  Existing iOS developers would not be required to port existing apps in the App Store over to a different screen format and possibly a different user experience.  It would make more sense to create a common content delivery API based on the uniqueness of this new platform.

Buying up large quantities of a particular size of screen does not necessarily mean that Apple is coming out with a new form factor for an existing product line. It could very well mean that we are about to see a new product altogether. And it is just as likely that this new form factor will be the new Apple TV as it is likely that Apple will come out with a mini iPad or a jumbo iPhone.  Perhaps this new in-between form factor is what Steve Jobs was referring to when he claimed that Apple had “cracked the code” when designing a new way to experience television.  Who needs a table full of IR remotes when everything you need is right there in your lap?

Image courtesy of Flickr user mac_ivan

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Credit: Bowen Liu/Apple Inc. via Bloomberg

The biggest challenge for Apple over the next several years will be how it adjusts under the leadership of Tim Cook. We’ve seen bits and pieces of what this new era means for Apple, but Fortune writer Adam Lashinsky has a cover story on Thursday that pulls it all together and is chock-full of fascinating details about how Apple is changing with him at the helm.

We’ve deviated from our usual roundup of must-read Apple coverage to highlight the story by Lashinsky, who wrote a book last year called Inside Apple. Here are the five most interesting details from the story that any Apple watcher should take note of:

• Wall Street loves Cook. Not only has the stock skyrocketed since Cook took over as permanent CEO in August, but he has given investors their long-awaited dividend, and he actually, like, talks to investors. And they love him for all of those things. Said one Goldman Sachs analyst: “By any quantitative measure, so far his performance is phenomenal.”
• Cook has embraced corporate types. He’s brought in a lot of MBA-toting new employees to Apple. And it’s not a real surprise, given his background as COO, that he’s emphasizing operational efficiency. But some are starting to wonder if efficiency is becoming more of a priority compared to engineering creativity. One former long-time Apple engineer is quoted as saying, “It looks like it has become a more conservative execution engine rather than a pushing-the-envelope engineering engine.”
• He’s a communicator. He was recently photographed meeting with Speaker John Boehner in Washington, D.C. But Lashinsky reports that he told several high-ranking politicians that he wanted to be “personally accessible to them.” The same seems to be true of his employees — he’ll randomly sit down to lunch with them at the Cupertino campus’s cafeteria — and his partners — he personally visited a Foxconn plant in the aftermath of the public outcry over working conditions there.
• He is not scary. Siri isn’t a finished product and has understandably had bugs. That would not have gone over well were Steve Jobs around, notes one employee. And whereas in the Jobs era employees feared him, some Apple employees now seem a little more relaxed, as he tells in one anecdote about an engineer who didn’t feel like he had to rush back to work right after lunch anymore. And the annual retreat for the company’s 100 best performers was actually considered fun this year and not as stressful as it had been under Jobs.
• He is shepherding the creation of new products that employees like. At the top performers retreat, those in attendance got a look at future products. One veteran executive was “blown away” while others “came away totally comfortable with where the company is headed.”

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I was leery when I heard the news about Axis, mainly because Yahoo’s mobile strategy has arguably been second-rate by comparison to Apple, Google, and Microsoft. Then I took Axis for a spin on my iPhone and I was pleasantly surprised. In my opinion, Yahoo has accomplished its stated goals with Axis, and its peers could learn something from the venerable search company.

First, I’m very impressed with the user interface implemented in Axis. It’s simple and fast to use once you understand it. Essentially, the browser has a number of sliding panes — both horizontally and vertically — that you swipe to get around the web.

You start out with an address bar that’s also a search field and results begin to appear immediately. Swiping left to right shows more results, which are essentially thumbnails of visual information; far richer than just text results. Tap a thumbnail and a bottom panel rises, showing the a web page. Bookmarks are available with a right to left swipe (or a tap) of a small ribbon icon. Tap an icon on the bottom of the browser and thumbnails of open tabs appear for your to navigate through or view.

The entire UI is seamless and very focused on swiping as opposed to tapping. Yahoo clearly spent time figuring out the best way to take advantage of the touchscreens found on today’s smartphones, and the effort shows. Although geared for mobile devices, I really like how Axis allows you to switch views optimized for iPhone, iPad and desktops from within the settings. I never expected to say this, but Google, Microsoft and even Apple could learn from Yahoo’s UI approach here. That’s debatable and open to personal opinion of course, but I really like what Yahoo did here.

How much will Axis matter in the grand scheme of things? Probably not too much because even with the well designed user interface, I don’t expect a significant number of iOS device users to switch browsers. Some might use Axis — or Opera, Dolphin HD or another third-party browser — on occasion, but since all links in iOS open Safari, few will likely bother to open up Axis on a regular basis. That’s a shame because Yahoo has delivered a solid browser for mobile devices in Axis.

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