How To Use a Mouse With Your iPad

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let me show you how you can control your iPad using a mouse.

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So iPadOS, also known as iOS 13 for iPad, has a great new feature where you can connect a Bluetooth Mouse to your iPad and then use that as a pointing device. So instead of tapping and dragging all around with your finger on the iPad screen you can use a mouse. You get a cursor and you can drag that around and you can click to tap.

So to setup your mouse go to Settings, then Accessibility, then Touch, then Assistive Touch. Then go to Devices and add your bluetooth mouse. I'm using an older Apple bluetooth mouse. It should work with most bluetooth mice also. Once you've got that connected then you need to go back up and turn on Assistive Touch to get it going. Now you'll be able to move your mouse and see a cursor. It's a circle with a dot in the middle of it and move around the screen. 

Now my mouse was automatically configured so a left click was basically the same as a tap. I was able to tap on menus and buttons and do things. The right click was configured to bring up the menu. The menu is how you access special functions that would be hard to get to otherwise. Like the Home button. So here I'm going to launch Safari and then I can scroll in Safari not with two fingers on the mouse like you might think, but by clicking and dragging. So just a single left click and drag. I can click on links just like you would like if you were using a Mac. 

There are really no surprises here. It works just like you would expect it would. Except you do have trouble when you want to do something like go Home you have to learn how to use that special menu. You can bring it up a variety of ways. I'm using the right click but you also can click that button that's at the bottom right hand corner of your screen and it will bring it up there as well. You can use it for things like going Home, bringing up the Control Center, etc.

In fact you can customize this menu. All you need to do is go back into Settings. Back under Assistive Touch. There you can look at the menu and you can pick one and customize its function. You also have the ability to change this cursor size and color and have it fade away after a few seconds until you move the mouse again. That way you can get it out of the way if you're watching video and such. Also you can control the speed of the mouse movement so you can make it fly across the screen with a slight touch of the mouse or move slowly and deliberately. So you can adjust it depending upon the size of your iPad screen, sensitivity of your mouse, and how you like things.

So here's the deal. This really isn't meant for people that would just prefer to use a mouse rather than touching the iPad screen. This is an Accessibility feature. So it's meant for people who may not be able to touch the screen or have difficulty doing that and have a much easier time using a pointing device. It could be a mouse. It could be something else. That's why it's all hidden down in the Accessibility features and why it may not be the ideal way to use an iPad. 

Now I could see if you're setting up your iPad and you've got a bluetooth keyboard and you want to have a mouse there and you just want to be in an app and do some writing. Then using this may actually work out for you. There's still the issue of multi touch. A lot of apps, especially games, really need you to be able to touch multiple places on the screen at the same time and do all sorts of gestures that's going to be difficult to reproduce using just a single point on the screen with a mouse and a cursor.

I find it funny that on the one hand there are people that really want to be able to use a mouse with an iPad and there are people on the Mac side of things that really want to have a Mac touchscreen. I think now that we have iPadOS it will be interesting to see in the coming months whether or not some people actually do adopt using a mouse with their iPad. I think it's highly dependent on how you use your iPad. If you're trying to use it kind of as a laptop or desktop replacement and if you're sticking to using only a few apps where this makes sense like say word processing. In future versions of iPadOS will Apple move this up and out of Accessibility functions and make this easily available for us to turn on and off and use everyday.