In early June, the well-known Apple Worldwide Developers Conference took place. WWDC is what most people call it, and it was on my mind for all the new features and updates they would be sharing about “iOS 13.” Apple users wait in crazy anticipation to see what cool, new (and sometimes needed) features have been added to their favorite platform.
I was waiting to hear if they would fix the Google Docs app for iOS on the iPad (the portion that demanded Apple make some updates to its operating system). That’s it. Sure, there are more great things they likely were working diligently on, but I needed to finish a report and my laptop was in use by a family member. So, I popped out the iPad and a Bluetooth keyboard to get the job done. Sure, it was an iPad Air 2, and the Bluetooth keyboard was a third party one, but I figured I could get away with using old technology. Spoiler: they fixed it. List of my favs below.
However, it was not the hardware that gave me issues. It was the software. The app for Google Docs on iOS is notoriously troublesome, and I’ve heard a ton of people griping about it for years. And, because Safari only loads you to a mobile site that kicks you back to the app, you are stuck with an inferior and troublesome interface, in an interminable loop.
This seemingly small problem is pretty representative of iOS in general. Don’t get me wrong, you can do lots of things. (I’m a fan of Apple and I believe them and their platform to be quite elegant.) It is, well, that you cannot always do things the way you want to do them, especially cross-platform. Nilay Patel, from the Verge, probably put it best: “I don’t want to have to adapt to my computer. I want my computer to adapt to me.”
That’s all set to change with iPadOS, which officially moves the iPad from a bigger iPhone, to, arguably, a smaller laptop. There are many great features and changes, so I am listing some of the best ones.
Full Desktop Browser
As I said up above, one of the big annoyances was that when using Safari on the iPad, you would get the mobile version of a site. Instead of getting the full one, you got a watered down experience or something that just kicked you to the app, such as YouTube or Google Docs. No more, with the introduction of iPadOS, which moves the iPad onto a full desktop browser. You now load the full, desktop version of a website, just like your MacBook would. And, thanks to the fact that there’s a new download manager built into Safari, you can now download things and actually do things with them, instead of having them vanish into the ether of iOS like they did before.
Mouse Support
I have heard a lot about new mouse support being added for accessibility features. Some have reported it may not be up to the full capabilities of a touchpad on a MacBook, but the mouse support does a lot. You can use any Bluetooth mouse, and it works just like on a regular computer, albeit with a big, ugly cursor wheel. You can open apps, go to the home screen without having to lean forward to swipe, get to the app switcher, and do more with a mouse.
External Storage Support
When the iPad Pro had its huge overhaul in 2018, it moved to USB-C (that deserves a “finally” comment). However, the one thing that arguably everyone wanted to use, external storage, did not work. Now, Apple has acknowledged and surrendered to customer requests. You can plug in a thumb drive straight into the iPad, provided in its USB-C, and the new revamped files app will allow you to put them wherever you want, like, on the thumb drive directly.
Much Improved Multitasking
You know that unfortunate moment when you had an app like Safari open, and you wanted to have another window of Safari, but you couldn’t because you couldn’t have two instances of the same app? Yep, sadly, me too. Now, that is a thing of the past. You can have as many windows of the same app open as you want, you can have multiple apps open in slide over, and, when you go out to the app switcher, it preserves all your configurations so you can hop right back to getting things done. Also, in Safari, when you have more than one tab open, you get a full toolbar, instead of the half measure one you used to get.
Apple Pencil Improvements
The Apple Pencil was already a superb writing and drawing tool. With the introduction of iPadOS, the Apple Pencil’s latency is largely fixed. Another really neat feature is that if you swipe up from the bottom left corner of the screen with your Apple Pencil, the iPad will take a screenshot, and you will immediately go into markup mode (or edit mode) with the Apple Pencil.
iPad Home Screen Improvements
You can now have another column of apps on your home screen, and widgets as well. Widgets never interested me that much before, but I realized their potential when they came to the home screen. Now, you can have an indicator that shows the battery of both your iPad and your Apple Pencil at the same time, as well as your favorite playlists all accessible directly from the home screen.
These are definitely more improvements that will impact your mobile use (meaning you are traveling for work, or simply out and about town trying to get some work done). But these are some of the ones I felt would allow me to fire up an app and get to work. Let me know what features would help you be more productive while operating from an iPad, a tablet, or a smartphone.
