Yes! Another week, another scintillating issue full of Cult of Mac’s best news stories and features, compiled in one place to read through easily on your iPad or iPhone. This week we’ve got some delightful coverage of the new Apple Pay features in iOS 8, tips and tricks on the latest operating systems, iOS 8.1 and OS X Yosemite, and a couple of great apps you won’t want to miss. That and more in this week’s spectacularly useful Cult of Mac Magazine.

Dig into Cult of Mac Magazine October 24 Edition, Free on iTunes

[UPDATE: Lots of readers report that the new option to activate iCloud Photo Library isn’t showing up on their devices. I’m looking into it. So far I know that the GM version — the one I used to write this guide —  and the final version are identical, build number 12A365. My guess is that Apple turned off the beta already]

iCloud Photo Library is rad. The idea is that all your full-res photos (including RAW photos) reside on Apple’s servers, and you access them from all your devices.

That’s a change from Photo Stream as it is now, which stores only the last 1,000 photos you took, not your whole collection. Apple has also introduced new tiers of iCloud storage pricing to cope with all your photos (and videos). This is now live, and I signed up for the 200GB option ($4 per month) to test it out.

Let’s take a look.

“We still have a lot to cover,” is Apple’s promise this time around. On October 15th, the company sent out press invitations for a media event that will be held at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco this coming Tuesday, October 22nd.

Last month we saw the unveiling of the iPhone 5s and 5c, and this second event is expected to center around new iPads. But that’s not all; the future of OS X, iOS 7, and the Mac are also rumored to be waiting in the wings.

Here’s what to expect from Apple’s October 22nd event:

Would you pay for your favorite app more than once? App Store developers are betting that you will.

When Apple unleashes iOS 7 on September 18th, hundreds of thousands of apps will be revamped for the new operating system in the days and weeks to come.

Each major 1.0 release of iOS marks an opportunity for app developers to go back to the drawing board. And with its radically new design language and hundreds of new APIs, devs are seeing iOS 7 as not only a clean slate, but a chance to earn more money off their existing apps.

OS X Mavericks (named after a surfing hot spot in California) was announced recently, and it contains a ton of new features for Mac users to pore over and learn anew. While not as incredible an overhaul as the concurrent update to iOS 7, Mavericks still contains some fairly helpful features and additions to make it worth some poking around, even in the beta.

Speaking of the beta, remember that any of the stuff we talk about below may only exist in the beta, or in some other form, so enjoy playing around with these things, but don’t worry when things are different when Mavericks releases for real in the Fall.

That said, let’s take a look at five new, hidden, and above all, interesting, features of the latest beta for OS X: Mavericks.

Apple made a lot of significant changes in iOS 7, and some of those will be instantly familiar to those who are running the latest versions of Android. As is often the case, Apple has “borrowed” certain features from rival operating systems, and we’ve counted at least seven that were part of Android first.

I’m not going to list all the problems with Apple’s iPhotos for OS X. I’ll just say that it’s clunky, slow, the library bloats as fast as a mob informer that’s been dumped in the Hudson, Photo Stream doesn’t work reliably and – every frikkin time I switch back to the app – it flips to the “Last Import” section in the source list. So I set out to find an alternative. This article will tell you all about my final choice – called Pixa – and a little bit about the alternatives.

The iPad is pretty great for photographers, but in typical Apple fashion, if you want to really use the device then you keep knocking up against crazy and annoying limits. The most obvious of these is probably the whole iPhoto/iPhoto problem: two apps, for Mac an iOS, that share a name but little else. They certainly don’t share their photos.

So what would I like to see fixed in iOS7? Here’s a list, complete with some suggestions for making things better

Apple has been using ideas that originated in the jailbreak community for years. A jailbreak tweak called MobileNotifier enhanced push notifications in iOS 4, and Apple hired the guy who made it and released Notification Center in iOS 5. Jailbreakers were doing multitasking and tethering before Apple too.

Looking ahead at iOS 7, I honestly have no idea what to expect from Apple. Jony Ive has never really been a big fan of skeuomorphism, so flatter and more minimalist graphics wouldn’t surprise me. Some truly innovate ideas for enhancing the iOS experience have arisen in the past year, and I think it would be foolish for Apple to not at least draw inspiration from these three.

As I never tire of telling people, I do all my work using an iPad. Research, communication, writing and photo editing – all of these are now second nature for me on both the iPad mini and the full-sized iPad 3. I love the portability, I love the stripped-down “workflow” which lets me get stuff done way faster than I can on the Mac, mostly due to lack of OS X’s inherent distractions.

In fact, I am so happy with the iPad as a work machine that I thought that I’d never buy another Mac. I figured that, by the time my iMac died, iOS would have caught up with most of the “truck” tasks I still need to do: keeping a big photo library, running a BitTorrent client.

So why am I writing this post on a brand-new MacBook Air? One thing: My arm is fucking killing me.