Using Your iPad as a Second Screen For Your Mac With Sidecar

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's talk about the most anticipated features of Catalina in iOS 13. It's called Sidecar and it allows you to use your iPad as a second screen for your Mac.

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So if you have a Mac and an iPad and they're fairly recent models with the new operating systems you'll be able to quickly and easily turn your iPad into another screen for your Mac. It works wirelessly or wired and you can use some touchscreen features on your iPad. If you have an Apple pencil you can use that as well to turn it into a full strength touchscreen for your Mac. 

There are two ways to initiate Sidecar. One is to use the Menu Bar icon. You just go there and you see your iPad here under Connect to. You can connect that way. Another way is to click on the green button at the top left hand corner or any window and you get an option there to send this window to Sidecar. It'll do the same thing but just two different ways to get into it. 

So you end up with two screens. Just like having two screens in any other situation on your Mac. You use your trackpad or mouse to move the cursor around and do things just like you would if this was any other screen attached to your Mac. What doesn't work is to use my finger on the touchscreen of the iPad. I can't use that to control the cursor. But what does work is using two fingers to scroll up and down inside of a window.

Notice on the left you've got various controls. The one at the very top will bring the Menu Bar into view or out of view. Now since it's always in view here it doesn't really do anything. But if I were to go full screen for this window then you can see I can use it to bring the Menu Bar in or out. The button just below it will bring the Dock into view on the iPad screen. Notice it takes it away from the Mac screen there. Then when I remove it from the iPad screen it goes back over to the Mac screen.

You've got some modifier keys here and these are for use when you're using the Apple pencil and you need to like Command click on something. You also can bring up a keyboard and you can move it around using the handle there and then you can type on this onscreen keyboard on your iPad as well as the keyboard with your Mac.

At the bottom you've got the Touch Bar. So even if you have a Mac that doesn't have a Touch Bar, you've got an iMac or MacBook Pro that doesn't have the Touch Bar, you now have a Touch Bar at the bottom of your iPad screen. This will change to reflect what app you're using. So here you see what appears on the Touch Bar for Safari. If I switch to TextEdit you can see here there's things that are related to that. You can tap on the little arrow here and it now goes into Style. So it works just like the Touch Bar does if you've got one on a MacBook Pro.

While using Sidecar you can quickly access some settings by going to the Menu Bar on either screen. Here you can set this to Mirror rather than be a separate screen so you see the same thing on both the Mac and the iPad. You can also quickly Disconnect and you can Hide the Sidebar and Hide the TouchBar portions. You can also easily get to the System Preferences panel for a Sidecar here but you can go through regular System Preferences too. In System Preferences you can switch the sides for the SideBar and also change the Touch Bar to appear on the top instead of the bottom.

Now this all works much better with an Apple pencil because you can use the pencil just like a mouse or a trackpad to move the cursor around on the iPad screen. So you can move windows around. You can point and click at things. Anything you can do with the mouse or trackpad.

Now for graphic artists, animators, illustrators, anybody that uses graphic's apps this is great because you can use the Apple pencil to draw directly in those apps. Some will support really advanced features. But it seems to work just as well, if not better, than the cursor normally. Here I'm just using Acorn and I'm drawing using the Apple pencil on my iPad. Of course this is all really taking place on the Mac. The screen on the iPad is just being used as a touchscreen to access the Acorn window on your Mac. 

There are some many use cases for this. A lot of people may already have a recent MacBook Pro and an iPad. Suddenly now with Catalina and iOS 13 they can do this and use their iPad as a second screen. Use it as a touchscreen for accessing their Mac apps. For others they may see this as a good alternative and a reason to buy an iPad if you're using a Mac and you need to have some sort of touchscreen drawing tablet. You can now get an iPad that not only does this but then you can also use it as an iPad.

I obviously use multiple screens when I work. But when I'm traveling I just have the screen on my MacBook Pro. Now I'll have that plus the screen on my iPad. I've used third party solutions for this before. This works better than all of them. The iPad makes a great travel screen because it's lightweight. It could work for hours off of its battery and I'm bringing it with me anyway. So it's not adding any additional weight or anything to have a second screen now with my MacBook Pro at almost all times.