It's been a hell of a year. In 2012, with your help and support, we changed our name to iMore and relaunched on a powerful new platform with fantastic new forums. We released the official iMore app and some forum apps to go with it. We broke a bunch of news and wrote a bunch of editorials and reviews, we loved a lot of apps, and you did to, and we began our hall of fame.

iMore hit almost 2 million readers and 10 million pageviews a month and, as a network, Mobile Nations hit over 12 million readers and 56 million pageviews.

We launched a couple new podcasts, including Debug, a companion show to Iterate, we like to think of as DVD extras for apps, and Ad hoc, where we bring together a bunch of nerds to talk about everything but mobile (like Star Wars and James Bond). Yours truly also joined the team at MacBreak Weekly, bringing you a couple extra hours of Apple talk a week.

It's been a hell of a year. Crazy as it sounds, we're still only just getting started.

Next week brings CES 2013, and next month, Macworld|iWorld 2013. We'll be covering both. There are going to be new and better features on the website -- you'll be seeing some of them soon on our sibling sites. We're working on hard on making the forums best in class. We've got the iMore app 2.0 well underway, with a lot of your most requested features, including commenting and push notifications. The forum apps are going somewhere really interesting as well.

We've got some amazing guests lined up for the next few podcasts as well. We've already posted the iMore show's 2013 preview, and tomorrow we'll be posting a special Iterate interview with Pacific Helm. All of them.

And that's just the stuff I can tease.

Once again, it's all thanks to you, our readers, listeners, and viewers. We appreciate each and every one of you, and what you allow us to do for you and with you.

You're why 2013 is going to be our biggest, best year ever.

Thank you, and Happy New Year!

When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone on the Macworld stage in 2007, he teased it as a revolutionary phone, a widescreen iPod, and a breakthrough internet communicator. Back then, many people were excited about the idea of an Apple phone. In hindsight, the phone app turned out to be one of the least exciting things about the iPhone. Part of that is because we had mobile phones before. From flips to candybars to phone apps on Palm and BlackBerry devices, making phone calls from even a wide-screen, multitouch iPod was nice, beautiful even, but not really revolutionary.

Mobile Safari was, however, an absolute breakthrough.

At the time Palm had Blazer, BlackBerry had their browser, and Windows Mobile had Pocket IE, and all of them stank. They couldn't render HTML properly. They couldn't render CSS properly. And JavaScript? Forget about it. Third party browsers were better, sometimes via proxy, sometimes by trying to implement their own rendering engines. But they still stank.

Safari on the iPhone changed all that. It didn't support Sun's Java, Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's ActiveX or Silverlight, Real, or any plugin for that matter, but as history has proven, that was a smart choice. It enabled better performance, longer battery life, and greater stability and security for all the native web technology Safari did support. Apple also created a new way to interact with the web, part of the overall multitouch interface in general, that used gestures instead of key-presses, to scroll with a swipe, to zoom with a pinch, to link with a tap. Apple made the mobile web usable.

It was so usable, so good, that it allowed Steve Jobs to take the WWDC stage just a few months later and announce Mobile Safari as the first (and only at the time) development platform for the iPhone, and web 2.0 + AJAX apps as first (and only at the time) apps. It wasn't anywhere nearly as "sweet" a solution as Jobs and Apple hoped or promised -- jailbreak app development continued, and Apple ended up releasing a proper, native SDK -- but it was powerful and flexible. It enabled a lot of phenomenal developers to make a lot of phenomenal software, from todo lists to social networks, utilities to games.

Apple even maintained a directory on Apple.com, showcasing the many web apps available for the platform, all made possible by Mobile Safari. (Last updated in December of 2010.)

The arrival of native apps in June of 2008 obliterated the short-term future of web apps, though some media properties still flirt with them. Apple has kept up Mobile Safari's development, however. They added Web.app so we could put web apps our Home screens, UIWebView so we could embed web pages and browsers in our apps, the Nitro JavaScript Engine so that even complex sites would still load fast, iCloud integration so all our web stuff is available everywhere, and they brought it to the iPad as well. UIWebView in particular, is used in a wide range of popular and needful apps, for good and for ill.

Mobile Safari's impact was so large, in fact, when the time came for Google to make both the original Android browser and Chrome, they went with WebKit. When Palm reinvented Blazer for webOS, they went with WebKit. When BlackBerry bought a new browser, they bought the WebKit-based Torch. When Microsoft brought mobile Internet Explorer out of the dark ages... well, they stuck with Spyglass but they were forced to up their previously stagnant game to compete with WebKit.

In a very real way, it changed the face of both the web and mobile, two of the most important technologies of the last decade. For all of those reasons, and in thanks to the the WebKit team, Safari team, and the developers at Apple who made it such an outstanding experience on the iPhone, it's fitting that the first ever inductee into iMore's hall of fame is one of the first, and still one of the most important apps in the history of iOS, and one crafted by the company that created the platform -- Mobile Safari.

If you've got an iPhone or iPad, odds are you've got your email accounts attached to it. If you use standard email services such as iCloud, Gmail, Hotmail, or Yahoo, you can better manage your messages by creating folders within your email account. The best part is that you can do it straight from your iPhone or iPad without ever having to access your mail from a desktop computer.

Not quite sure how? That's okay. Follow along and we'll have your email cleaned up and organized in no time.

1. Launch the Mail app from the Home screen of your iPhone or iPad.
2. Here you'll see two sections that are labeled Inboxes and Accounts. We will be working with the Accounts section towards the bottom.

3. Tap into the Account that you need to create folders within.
4. Tap the Edit button in the upper right hand corner.

5. You will see a new button appear in the bottom right hand corner titled New Mailbox. Tap on it.

6. Type in the name of the folder aka mailbox you'd like to create.

7. You can also change the Mailbox Location directly underneath where you type the name of the mailbox. This is nice for times when you want to nest mailboxes inside of each other. For example, you can have a general work mailbox and then a mailbox inside of that for each colleague if you really want to.

8. Once you're done deciding where you'd like the mailbox to be located at, tap Save in the upper right hand corner of the create mailbox screen.

That's all there is to it, you can now start moving messages to the mailboxes you've just created. Feels good to be organized doesn't it?

Neither the world, nor the web, lives by news alone. 2012 had more than its fair share of new apps and devices, of major triumphs and tragedies, but to go along with all the facts and specs, to counterpoint the news, iMore published a slew of views and opinions, reviews and comparisons. So, once again, we fired up the analytics, ordered everything by popularity, and put this togther.

And here they are, your favorite editorials of 2012!

5. The future of Siri and Apple's services

Now, Apple has started hiring people away from Amazon to help with the service and, in the wake of a management re-ogranization, Siri has been given to Apple's "fixer", senior vice-president Eddy Cue to help set, or reset, its course going forward.

Because Siri is only as useful as its weakest server and slowest response, and both those things are going to need some serious attention.

• The future of Siri and Apple's services
• No skin in the Game Center

4. Best free iPhone apps

We love paying for great apps, because it ensures we'll get more great apps, but when you don't know what you want, when you're new and just want to try stuff out, when you're looking for a fling instead of a relationship, nothing beats great free apps. Leanna put together an amazing collection of apps, and Simon of games, and you guys couldn't get enough of them.

• Best free iPhone apps
• Best free iPhone games
• Best free iPad apps
• Best free iPad games

3. The 16:9 iPhone

A few days ago rumors began to focus on the idea that Apple was moving to a 4-inch screen on the iPhone 5 (or whatever Apple ends up calling iPhone 5,1). I went through the mental exercise of mocking up, and breaking down, the various 4-inch iPhone options to try and figure out how Apple would get there.

Now, however, the rumors are coalesced around one specific option -- one I initially thought had fewer advantages, and was hence less likely -- a 16:9 aspect ratio, 1136 x 640 display.

• The 16:9 iPhone
• Going big: The 5-inch iPhone

2. Higher hanging fruit

Once all the low-hanging fruit has been picked, what do you go after next? We took a look at iOS 5 and what it lacked compared to competing operating system, and it proved remarkably popular. Given the direction Apple went with iOS 6, much of it still applies for iOS 7.

Interestingly, many of the newly rebooted operating systems lacked -- and some still lack -- all the features of their predecessors. And because they rebooted, Apple's iOS, once the new smartphone operating system on the block, is now one of the oldest.

That doesn't mean Apple can and should replicate each and every feature of their competitors. I'd argue many of the ones listed below shouldn't be copied, perhaps shouldn't even be re-imagined with an iOS twist. But they should be considered. Apple is famous for saying "no" more than they say "yes", but they're just as famous for the arduous design and prototyping process they go through to get there.

• Higher hanging fruit
• Apple's multi-billion dollar balancing act

1. iOS 6 review

Our biggest non-news story of the year was Apple's big mobile software release of the year. At almost 16,000 words, we dove deep, and you loved every bit of it. (And several of our other reviews as well.)

iOS 6 is a software update divided against itself. Apple claims over 200 new user-facing features, which is the same if not more than previous versions of iOS. Many of these are good and solid, reducing the friction and increasing the functionality of iOS, and delightfully so. But a lot of it them are also about Apple and the future of their platform.

• iOS 6 review
• iPhone 5 review
• iPad 4 review
• iPad mini review